Rocky Kistner is a communications associate for the NRDC. This post is adapted from one that appeared on the NRDC blog Switchboard. Kistner contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

It's been a warm, rain-soaked summer in the small lakeside community of Mayflower, a sleepy residential town north of Little Rock, Ark., famous its bluegill and bass fishing in nearby Lake Conway.

But for some folks here, the rain has brought an unpleasant reminder that Mayflower is not the same picture-postcard community it once was. Instead, its residents say they are still suffering health effects from an estimated 5,000 barrels of tar-sands crude oil that burst from an ExxonMobil pipeline on March 29th and poured through a residential neighborhood. The black, viscous oil then flowed into culverts and a creek by the town shopping center, finally draining into a marshy area of the lake where much of it remains buried in sediment. Residents say heavy rains cause the oil to leak out into a cove that drains into Lake Conway.

Although locals say cleanup work in the marshy cove has dropped off significantly, they say they can still smell the sickly sweet odor of crude after it rains. Some still complain of health problems like headaches, nausea and vomiting that have plagued families near the cove since the end of March.

"I'm still having problems breathing," says Sherry Appleman, who lives near the oil-soaked cove on the lake and lost her husband to cancer in June, a condition she believes was made worse by the poisonous spill five months ago. She says she's battled headaches and asthma-like conditions since the tarry crude invaded her once-pristine Arkansas lakeside environment five months ago. "Our health conditions have gotten worse, people with cancer have gotten worse instead of getting better….the local health department says everything's normal, but they're just saying what Exxon wants them to say."

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Marshland on Lake Conway in Mayflower, Ark., where much of the oil from the ExxonMobil tar-sands oil …