The North Dakota Department of Health, which was criticized for waiting 11 days to disclose "a massive oil spill in September, said it will start publishing information about oil and chemical spills on its website," Mike Lee reports for Environment & Energy News. David Glatt, chief of the agency's environmental-health section, said all information on spills of oil, industrial chemicals and agricultural chemicals will be posted within a few weeks on a public website, "and the department is considering issuing press releases for spills of more than 250 barrels and those that affect waterways or public health."
Glatt said the department was planning to make the data more accessible even before the spill, which "left 20,600 barrels soaked into a wheat field outside Tioga in the northwest corner of the state," Lee writes. The spill was the state's biggest "since the beginning of the Bakken Shale oil boom, which has turned North Dakota into the second-biggest oil-producing state in the United States." (Please read more from The Rural Blog // visit site)
