This past weekend, an ExxonMobil pipeline carrying nearly 100,000 barrels of toxic tar sands crude spewed into Mayflower, Arkansas. Yards are flooded in black crude, a river of toxic oil flows down the street, and the nearby fishing lake is covered in black grease. Families have been evacuated, but nobody knows what the dangers to the community are, or even how much oil has been spilled. Why? Because Exxon’s not talking.

Let’s hold ExxonMobil accountable for this spill by demanding it release all the information on this spill -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- while the images of play sets and driveways overrun with crude oil are still in the public eye.

Tell ExxonMobil to release information about the tens of thousands barrels of crude spilled in Arkansas.

ExxonMobil is controlling the no-fly zone over the spill site that the federal government put in place to keep news helicopters from capturing images of the disaster. ExxonMobil is being so secretive because it wants people to believe that pipelines like this are perfectly safe and pose no threat to people or the planet. But this catastrophe in Arkansas foreshadows a future reality for anyone who lives along the thousands of miles of pipeline being considered for approval by the U.S. government.

Right now, ExxonMobil and other oil companies are lobbying furiously for the Keystone XL, a massive pipeline stretching across the North America that will transport enough toxic tar to be "game over" for the planet. If approved, the Keystone XL will be carrying even more of the same hard-to-clean-up toxic crude as the oil spilled in Arkansas.

The last thing ExxonMobil and its ilk want is to tell us the truth about its dirty business while legislators are making such a high-stakes decision on the Keystone XL. It knows that if we can use this spill in Arkansas to show the world the reality of these pipelines, we may be able to stop the Keystone XL in its tracks. And it's especially vulnerable to public pressure right now, since images of backyards covered in its tar sands crude are leaking out and going viral on Facebook.

Tell ExxonMobil to release all the information it has on the massive pipeline spill.

Together, we can expose the reality for people in the path of the crude spill, help show the public that the pipelines that ExxonMobil and other major companies haven't started construction on yet are unsafe too, and hopefully stop future pipelines in their tracks entirely.

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Additional reading:

Exxon Mobil pipeline leaks ‘a few thousand’ barrels of crude oil in Arkansas. Washington Post. March 31st, 2013  

Exxon controls skies over Arkansas oil spill. Salon. April 4th, 2013.