Spill Casts Chill on Keystone XL ProjectWhen a spill from the Exxon Mobil Pegasus pipeline can leave a suburb of Little Rock, Ark., looking like a post-apocalyptic scene from "The Walking Dead," it sounds a lot of alarms for communities along the proposed path of the Keystone XL project. The Pegasus Line spill, which happened March 29, led to the evacuation of 22 houses in the small town of Mayflower, Ark. The Environmental Protection Agency called it a "major spill," and while it was unclear how much oil had leaked, Exxon Mobil said last week that it had recovered thousands of gallons of oil mixed with water. The company said it had prepared for a spill as large as 420,000 gallons, but thought it would turn out to be smaller. It was unclear what caused the spill, but age and inspection methods are expected to be factors. The Pegasus pipeline, which runs 858 miles from Patoka, Ill., to Nederland, Texas, is 65 years old. It was adapted a few years ago to increase its capacity by 50 percent. Federal data show that over the past decade an average of nearly 3.5 million gallons of oil spill from pipelines annually. The nation's aging pipeline system overall — more than half were built before 1970 — and methods of inspecting it are being brought into question in the wake of this latest spill. Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel is investigating the situation there and said he was assured by Exxon that its pipeline inspections were up to date and showed no cause for concern. McDaniel said that makes him wonder whether the inspection process is adequate. The National Transportation Safety Board says the pipeline system is largely safe and that the problems can be corrected with a greater commitment to safety.
She said investigators repeatedly find such things as cracks and corrosion that do not get fixed, and that companies need to invest more in safety. An industry organization, the Association of Oil Pipe Lines, maintains that the safety record of pipelines is improving and says the industry spends more than $1 billion a year on inspection and maintenance. From the sound of it, no one is fully accepting blame or offering reassurances that further accidents can be prevented. While that is the situation, plans for TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline, which would move heavy Canadian crude oil like the Pegasus Line carried, must not continue. This page in the past has noted that the Keystone XL proposal is a "hustle being sold on phony promises of tens of thousands of jobs and environmental safety." That has not changed. The proposal is to add about 1,200 miles to an existing 2,100-mile oil pipeline system that runs from northern Alberta, Canada, to Cushing, Okla. Spill, by the way, is a misnomer. No matter that it's the term used by the EPA and the oil industry, spill sounds insignificant. You spill a glass of milk. But a leak of hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil is something else again. Thesauras.com gives us a host of choices, among them disgorge and discharge, both of which are more accurate verbs. Let's call these environmental tragedies what they are and, until the record on pipeline repairs and fractures is improved, reject the idea of expanding the Keystone pipeline. REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM 
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