Shocking: Tar sands oil flows through Arkansas neighborhood’s streets

Video published to YouTube on Sunday evening purports to show tar sands oil flowing through the streets of an Arkansas neighborhood following an Exxon-Mobil pipeline rupture on Friday.

“So that is a pipeline that has busted and has flooded the neighborhood, and is going all the way to a drain at the end of the street,” the cameraman explains as he drives down a neighborhood street coated on one side with a thick stream of black liquid.

“The smell is unbelievable,” he says. “Incredible. That is oil.”

It’s not just any oil, either: it’s tar sands, a heavy, gritty and more toxic type of oil that is particularly difficult to transport and even more difficult to clean out of water sources.

An Exxon-Mobil pipeline rupture that affected Montana in 2011 also happened along a line that ran tar sands, which experts say can corrode the inside of pipelines because of its heavy grit and harsh chemical additives that keeps the oil viscus enough to flow.