Massive Oil Spill in ND

news.yahoo.com...

Took the farmer 12 days to report the leak!

A North Dakota farmer who discovered an oil spill the size of seven football fields while out harvesting wheat says that when he found it, crude was bubbling up out of the ground.

Farmer Steve Jensen says he smelled the crude for days before the tires on his combines were coated in it. At the apparent break in the Tesoro Corp.'s underground pipeline, the oil was "spewing and bubbling 6 inches high," he said in a telephone interview Thursday.

What Jensen had found on Sept. 29 turned out it was one of the largest spills recorded in the state. At 20,600 barrels it was four times the size of a pipeline rupture in late March that forced the evacuation of more than 20 homes in Arkansas.

Four times the size of the one in Arkansas earlier this year. Bubbling crude, but he won't be rich.

Kind of amazing that they dont have some sort of sensor that can detect breaks in the pipelines and diffuse situations like this one before it even begins.