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Perknose
Forum Director
10-21-2014
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/10/21/3582480/north-dakota-spill-one-year-later/
‘It Will Never Be The Same’: North Dakota’s 840,000-Gallon Oil Spill One Year Later
One year ago, when more than 20,000 barrels (840,000 gallons) of crude oil spilled from a pipeline and soaked a wheat field in Tioga, North Dakota, the public almost never knew about it. After the spill was discovered by a lone farmer, it was not reported for nearly two weeks, and only after reporters from the The Associated Press asked about it specifically.
To this day, the farmland is still sopped with oil, and Tesoro is still working to clean it up. “It’s a big cleanup and it’s become part of our life,” Jensen
told the AP on Monday. “The ground is still saturated with oil. And they’re out there seven days a week, 24 hours a day.”
Tesoro has said it is committed to cleaning up the spill and “making things right.” But the fact that the company didn’t know what had happened, and that such a large release of oil into the environment took so long to be discovered and reported, sparked outrage at the time of the incident. The
AP conducted
an investigation after the spill, and found that nearly 300 oil spills and 750 “oil field incidents” had occurred in North Dakota since January 2012 —
none of which were reported to the public.
Tesoro’s pipeline is regulated by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). But even the director of that agency has admitted that it faces extreme difficulty in enforcing their regulations. PHMSA head Jeffrey Wiese
said last year that the agency has “very few tools to work with” in enforcing safety rules, and that the regulatory process surrounding pipelines is “kind of dying.”
Schaffer said there has been somewhere in the neighborhood to 1,500 to 1,600 incidents of contamination by oil, gas, and wastewater from pipelines and well sites in 2013 — most of which were small, and none of which were as big as the Tesoro incident. But what that proves to him is that pipeline infrastructure needs to be updated, more pipeline inspectors need to be on the ground, and new technologies need to be implemented to monitor both the condition of the pipelines and whether an accident has occurred.
“We don’t have those things in place, and we should,” he said. “Oil companies are making a lot of money in North Dakota, and they should be spending money to put these safeguards in place so we don’t have people’s health and safety at risk.”