We expect to hear of bizarre happenings in our county from time to time: shootings, traffic accidents, fires, even tragedies. But a ruptured pipe leaking oil into neighborhoods near a lake is not anything any of us wants to deal with.

When it happened Friday afternoon, it seemed as if the right people went to work, assessing the situation, shutting off the flow of the pipe and dealing with the inevitable cleanup. And to those people we are grateful.

We have seen the photos of oil seeping into back yards and front yards and driveways and cul-de-sacs. We have driven by and smelled the pungent odor. Yes, only a few have had to be evacuated, but that doesn’t make it any less important.

When you buy a house to make a life, you don’t expect “Texas Tea” to erupt, and even worse, you don’t get to sell it like the Beverly Hillbillies did.

So in the wake of the ruptured pipe and the blackened drainage and the stink in the city of Mayflower, we’d like to ask a few more questions.

Who will clean this up? Who will pay for this to be cleaned up? Will this fall on the taxpayers or will this be taken care of by the owners of that pipe, Exxon?

Will our state senator fight for a private company to take care of its own mess or will he simply show up for a photo opportunity like he did in the late afternoon Friday?

This is something that happens, we realize that.

But if we don’t pay attention to the aftermath, we could find out that this bizarre incident hurt us a lot more than a little oil and a bad smell.

— Log Cabin Democrat (Ark.)