ND State Officials Blatantly Misrepresent Scale Of Damage From Fracking Spills; Reporting Pathetic

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A company must report a spill within 24 hours and fill out an official Environmental Incident report. But these reports are riddled with inaccuracies and estimates. Volumes are often rough estimates, rounded to the nearest 10 or 100 barrels. In about five percent of spill reports submitted to the state since 2006, the volume section of the form was left blank.

In the Petro Harvester spill near the Peterson's land, the state’s official report says 12,600 gallons spilled. But on the back side a note from a health inspector reads, "Duration and volume really unknown, but very large." And a notice of violation from the state's Department of Health to Petro Harvester shows the company later hauled off over 2 million gallons of wastewater, making it one of the largest spills in state history. The official spill estimate was never updated -- not in the state’s report, and not in the Department of Health's database of spills.

Peterson, who is suing some of the companies responsible for spills on his land, believes the underreporting has contributed to the slow pace of clean-up and lack of media coverage of the spill. "This minimizing is only going to benefit the regulators, who can say spills are down, and the oil companies, at the expense of the landowners and the farmers," he said. Inaccurate report volumes don't appear be a priority for inspectors like Kris Roberts at the Department of Health. In a legal deposition provided to Inside Energy by Peterson's lawyer, Roberts said, "the volume that was spilled or recovered is not as important as what is done to clean up the problem."

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Not only are the accessible reports unreliable, but state officials are, too. On multiple occasions, employees of the state's Department of Mineral Resources misrepresented the extent of the state's spill problem in public and in interviews with reporters. In January 2013, Director Lynn Helms testified in front of the state legislature against a bill to require monitors on all wastewater pipelines, saying the proposal was too broad and that the monitors would not be effective in catching the smallest leaks. "Yes, the number of spills is up," he said. "But look at it in comparison to the number of wells. The rate of spills is way, way down." In fact, using the state's own data, we calculated that the rate of spills was way, way, up. It’s more than twice as high as it was in 2006, at the start of the Bakken boom, and three times as high as in 2004.



http://insideenergy.org/2015/02/16/state-officials-misrepresent-north-dakotas-spill-problem/