The North Dakota Department of Health has approved a remediation plan for the site of a pipeline leak near Tioga.
Last September, about 20-thousand barrels of crude was leaked from a broken pipeline on farmland near Tioga. Tesoro is responsible for the remediation of the leak. Dave Glatt is chief of the Environmental Health Section of the health department and says Tesoro considered a number of different remediation options.
"They looked at several different remediation technologies and what they settled on is called 'thermal disorption,' and it primarily is just digging the soil up where it's contaminated, putting it through a piece of equipment that brings the soil at a very high temperature and burns off the oil. And then at the end, they're going to save that soil and put it back into the excavation clean."
Glatt says the health department will have staff monitoring the remediation process to ensure that the process is on time, and on schedule. He says it is expected the process could take up to two years to complete.
