Sediment Tests Will Show If Mayflower Residents Saved Their Treasured Lake from Oil Spill
InsideClimate News 2013-08-14
Summary:
By Elizabeth McGowan
MAYFLOWER, Ark.—Anything for his treasured fishing hole. That was the mantra cycling through Jimmy Joe Johnson's head on the afternoon of Friday, March 29 as he rushed to keep a filthy stream of crude oil from spilling out of a cove and into the main body of Lake Conway.
Standing at the edge of the lake more than four months later, Johnson had his fingers crossed that his efforts that day weren't for naught. Officials with the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) say they feel certain that soon-to-come results from sediment testing will confirm what water tests revealed—that no oil reached the main body of the lake.
But Johnson won't stop fretting until he sees definitive proof that the lake wasn't sullied.
Johnson's lookout on this steamy August day is roughly nine-tenths of a mile from the spot where oil from ExxonMobil's ruptured Pegasus pipeline gushed into a subdivision of neat, brick homes. Instinct and familiarity with the local topography guided Johnson and a crew of locals to this site on that fateful Friday afternoon—a man-made dike about the length of a football field and wide enough to support two lanes of State Highway 89 traffic.