Internal Documents Reveal Coverup in North Dakota Oil Spill

By Jesse Coleman

North Dakota, long known for its cattle ranches and open spaces, has recently become one of the oil and gas industry’s most prized—and profitable—possessions, thanks to the advent of fracking. However, the price of oil and gas industry development is paid in destruction to the environment and strains to the regulatory framework meant to protect the public from a reckless industry, as Tesoro’s massive oil spill attests.

When the spill was finally reported to the authorities, the quarter inch hole in the pipeline had already released hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil. Photo credit: Neal Lauron/ Greenpeace

Documents from an open records request by Greenpeace have uncovered that Tesoro, a fracking giant based in San Antonio:

Possibly Knew Their Pipeline was Dangerously Weak

Tesoro ran tests on the pipeline that ruptured more than two weeks before the spill was discovered. For the remainder of this important article please click the link to EcoWatch: http://ecowatch.com/2013/10/24/documents-reveal-coverup-north-dakota-oil-spill/