I was invited to South Portland to tell my story and to help make people aware of the real dangers of tar sands. My name is Genieve Long, I am a mother of four children, a full-time college student, a lifelong resident of Mayflower, Arkansas, and I live next to the house I grew up in. It was one year ago when a tar sands spill happened in my town and I don’t want South Portland to go through the same disaster we did.

The morning of March 29, 2013, was beautiful and sunny. Later in the afternoon a horrid smell filled the town and everything quickly became chaotic. The 65-year-old aging Exxon Mobil Pegasus pipeline that travels through my town ruptured and 210,000 gallons of Canadian tar sands spilled from a split along its welded seam.

The Pegasus pipeline was not built to transport this thick, extremely toxic and corrosive product and it was built using a welding technique that is considered by experts to be flawed.

Chunks of tar in a stream of thick tar sands ran through a development one mile from my house. It ran down a street and in back yards and into a cove near a lake that is a source of drinking water. The tar sands ended up in water about 300 feet from my house. If the pipeline had ruptured about five miles north of Mayflower it would have affected the drinking water of 450,000 Arkansas residents.

I went to pick up my children from school and the school had not been evacuated even though the fumes from the spill were very strong. Our immediate health symptoms were migraines, nausea, vomiting, gastrointestinal issues, and respiratory problems (wheezing, shortness of breath).

In the days following the spill, Mayflower became one huge construction zone: 18-wheelers hauled in heavy machinery and storage tanks, potable water trucks covered our streets, police officers barricaded roads, fire departments came from multiple different areas to aid in the cleanup. Exxon, government agencies, and city officials determined our lives immediately. They controlled what parts of town we went to, what homes we could go in, what businesses stayed open, if we could go to the cove and see what was going on. No-fly zones went into place and media was limited. It all seemed surreal and more like a bad movie.

Our health has been impacted by the toxic cocktail of chemicals that were mixed with the tar sands just to make it moveable through a pipeline. Some of the chemicals are known to cause cancer, genetic birth defects in humans and aquatic life, neurological disorders, blood disorders and leukemia in small children.

Ever since the spill, my family has fought tooth and nail to recover and get back to our normal lives. For the last year we have been sick off and on and now we take several medications for different health problems. We didn’t need these medications before the spill.

Mayflower and its people have been ravaged by this disaster, our land has been damaged for years to come, people’s homes have been demolished, houses are for sale, health issues have skyrocketed and our wetlands have been devastated. I am devastated to know what the lasting impacts are and that my town will ever be the same again.

In your newspapers here there have been ads about tar sands – and when I read one of Exxon’s ads that said, “It’s just oil from Canada – Safe and Reliable”, I just about choked on my coffee! Tar sands is nothing like regular oil, it is heavy and sticky and sinks in water. A year after the spill in my town you can still see the sheen on the water. If it gets cleaned off it reappears later and they replace booms in the water to try to remove it again. If I go to the cove near my house and use a shovel to dig up some dirt you can see the tar sands in the dirt.

Another ad in your papers said tar sands “is good for South Portland.” I can assure you there is nothing safe and reliable about this product. There are no real ways to clean up a tar-sands spill. They still use methods that are proven not to get all the oil cleaned up.

Before March 29, 2013, Mayflower was a quiet, strong, dependable, close-knit community of 2,500 people. Now it is a struggling town with stress and worry that the pipeline that spilled here will be restarted and another accident will happen. Exxon Mobil says the mess is cleaned up and they want to restart the Pegasus.

My life in Mayflower since the spill has been a whirlwind of emotions, sickness and stress. I have to take things day by day and stride by stride to try and maintain a normal balance in life for my children. Every day is a struggle, but I have to get up and dust off and fight harder than the day before. South Portland has what we didn’t have in Mayflower. South Portland has a chance to prevent the Mayflower disaster from happening here.

Tar sands was not good for Mayflower and it is not good for South Portland, and you need to do whatever you can to keep tar sands out of your town. Only you can fight for your town and you have to fight to keep tar sands out of it.

Genieve Long is a resident of Mayflower, Ark., the site of a 2013 tar-sands oil spill.