VIDEO – Shattered by Oil: Exxon Arkansas Spill and the People Left Behind, Part 2

Fears for the future: About one in four people in Arkansas counts on drinking water from a source that is crossed by Exxon's burst Pegasus pipeline.

Share This Article

Credit: InsideClimate News and This American Land

Share This Article

On March 29, 2013, ExxonMobil’s 850-mile Pegasus oil pipeline split open and spilled 210,000 gallons of Canadian dilbit across an Arkansas suburb.

The oil spill was a wake-up call about aging pipelines and specifically about the Pegasus, a 65-year-old line that most people near the spill site didn’t know existed. The pipe crisscrosses 13 Arkansas counties and 18 drinking water sources on its way to Texas—including the Maumelle watershed, a water source for 400,000 people in Central Arkansas. The rupture happened just eight pipeline miles from Maumelle.

In Part 2 of “Shattered by Oil“—an ICN co-production with This American Land—Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth McGowan talks with water utility officials, residents and others about the “what-ifs”—and about how they’re working to get the pipeline relocated or shut down for good.

PART 1:

This video is part of a joint investigative project by InsideClimate News and the Arkansas Times. Funding for the project comes from readers who donated to an ioby.org crowdfunding campaign that raised nearly $27,000 and from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

About This Story

Perhaps you noticed: This story, like all the news we publish, is free to read. That’s because Inside Climate News is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. We do not charge a subscription fee, lock our news behind a paywall, or clutter our website with ads. We make our news on climate and the environment freely available to you and anyone who wants it.

That’s not all. We also share our news for free with scores of other media organizations around the country. Many of them can’t afford to do environmental journalism of their own. We’ve built bureaus from coast to coast to report local stories, collaborate with local newsrooms and co-publish articles so that this vital work is shared as widely as possible.

Two of us launched ICN in 2007. Six years later we earned a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and now we run the oldest and largest dedicated climate newsroom in the nation. We tell the story in all its complexity. We hold polluters accountable. We expose environmental injustice. We debunk misinformation. We scrutinize solutions and inspire action.

Donations from readers like you fund every aspect of what we do. If you don’t already, will you support our ongoing work, our reporting on the biggest crisis facing our planet, and help us reach even more readers in more places?

Please take a moment to make a tax-deductible donation. Every one of them makes a difference.

Thank you,

Share This Article