FILE - This Oct. 11, 2013 file photo shows cleanup at the site of a Tesoro Corp. pipeline break that spilled more than 20,000 barrels of oil into a Tioga, N.D., wheat field. The massive oil spill still... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - This Oct. 11, 2013 file photo shows cleanup at the site of a Tesoro Corp. pipeline break that spilled more than 20,000 barrels of oil into a Tioga, N.D., wheat field. The massive oil spill still isn't fully cleaned up three years and three months after it happened. The company responsible hasn't... (Associated Press) 
 
 BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — Three years and three months later, a massive oil spill in North Dakota still isn't fully cleaned up. The company responsible hasn't even set a date for completion. 
 
 Though crews have been working around the clock to deal with the Tesoro Corp. pipeline break, which happened in a wheat field in September 2013, less than a third of the 840,000 gallons that spilled has been recovered — or ever will be, North Dakota Health Department environmental scientist Bill Suess said. 
 
 A farmer, Steve Jenkins, who'd smelled the crude oil for days, discovered the spill in his northwestern North Dakota field near Tioga — his combines' tires were covered in it. 
 
 While the nearest home was a half-mile away and the state said no water sources were contaminated and no wildlife hurt, one of the largest onshore oil spills recorded in the U.S. serves for some as a cautionary example, especially given a recent pipeline break about 150 miles south and ongoing debates over the four-state Dakota Access pipeline. 
 
 "What happened to us happened and we can't go back," said Patty Jensen, Steve's wife. This month's pipeline break in Belfield, which belched an estimated 176,000 gallons of oil into a creek that feeds into the Little Missouri River, a tributary of the Missouri River, really rankled her. 
 
 "But I get really upset when I hear of a new one and I wonder what is being done to prevent these spills," she said. 
 
 Both the Tesoro break and the Belfield break occurred on 6-inch steel pipelines — a part of a large network pipelines that crisscross western North Dakota's oil patch. By comparison, the Dakota Access pipeline is made of 30-inch steel and will carry nearly 20 million gallons daily. 
 
 The Tesoro spill was not far from where oil was first discovered in North Dakota in 1951.The Texas-based company and federal regulators have said a lightning strike may have caused the 2013 rupture in the pipeline, which runs from Tioga to a rail facility outside of Columbus, near the Canadian border. 
 
 North Dakota regulators initially thought just 750 barrels of oil was involved in the spill, but later updated the amount exponentially. They also expanded the affected acreage from about 7 — the size of seven football fields — to about 13 acres, Suess said. The cleanup has cost Tesoro more than $49 million to date and is expected to top $60 million, according to recent filings to the state. 
 
 Tesoro spokeswoman Destin Singleton said she could not immediately confirm the numbers, and noted the cleanup completion date remains unknown. The pipeline was monitored remotely, but the company has said the spill wasn't detected. 
 
 Crews have had to dig as deep as 50 feet to remove hundreds of thousands of tons of oil-tainted soil, Suess said. The company has now switched to special equipment that cooks hydrocarbons from crude-soaked soil in a process called thermal desorption before putting it back in place. 
 
 The Dec. 5 spill on the Belle Fourche pipeline also was discovered by a landowner. Crude oil migrated about almost 6 miles from the spill site along Ash Coulee Creek, and fouled an unknown amount of private and U.S. Forest Service land along the waterway. Seuss said it appears no oil got as far as the Little Missouri River, and no drinking water sources were threatened. 
 
 It's not yet clear why monitoring equipment didn't detect the leak, according to Wendy Owen, a spokeswoman for Casper, Wyoming-based True Cos., which operates the pipeline. 
 
 The Dakota Access pipeline builder, Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners, has said the project will be safe and that workers remotely monitoring the pipeline will be able to shut it down if a leak is detected. 
 
 Owen said didn't know how long it would take to clean the Belle Fourche spill, given that wintry weather was slowing down the progress, or how much it would cost. 
 
 Patty Jensen is aware of the glacial pace of oil spill cleanups. For more than three years, it's been part the couple's life. 
 
 "They are there working away 24 hours a day, seven days a week — it's pretty amazing," she said. "The noise from the equipment used to bug us but we've grown used to it." ||||| BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — A company with a history of oil field-related spills in North Dakota and Montana is being hampered by winter weather in its cleanup of a "significant" pipeline break that leaked crude oil into a tributary of the Little Missouri River in western North Dakota, a regulator said Thursday. 
 
 Bill Suess, an environmental scientist with the North Dakota Health Department, said the Belle Fourche Pipeline Co. spill was discovered Monday by a landowner near Belfield. The cause of the leak is under investigation and the amount of the spill is unknown, in part because of recent blizzards and subzero temperatures throughout North Dakota, he said. 
 
 "Anytime you have cold temperatures, it's going to hinder cleanup and the investigation," Suess said. 
 
 He said the spill migrated about 2½ miles from the spill site along Ash Coulee Creek, and it fouled an unknown amount of private and U.S. Forest Service land along the waterway. He said state and federal inspectors have been monitoring the spill and that it appeared to be contained. The creek was free-flowing when the spill occurred but has since frozen over. 
 
 The spill in the creek is about 20 miles upstream of the Little Missouri River. Suess said it did not appear that any of the oil reached the river and no drinking water sources were affected. 
 
 The 6-inch steel pipeline is mostly underground but was built above ground as it crossed the creek, Suess said. The pipeline is used to gather oil from nearby oil wells to a collection point. 
 
 "It is not a transmission line so overall it won't have a major impact on oil movement," Suess said. 
 
 Belle Fourche Pipeline is part of Casper, Wyoming-based True Cos. A spokeswoman for True, Wendy Owen, said the pipeline was shut down immediately after the leak was discovered and crews had been cleaning it up since. She said it was not known how much oil leaked due to the pipeline breach. 
 
 Owen said she "couldn't even begin to speculate" what caused the breach and that the company was doing its "best to assess the entire situation and what the next step will be." 
 
 True Cos. operates at least three pipeline companies with a combined 1,648 miles of line in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming, according to information the companies submitted to federal regulators. 
 
 Since 2006 the companies have reported 36 spills totaling 320,000 gallons of petroleum products. Most of the product spilled was never recovered, including after a January 2015 pipeline break into the Yellowstone River. The 32,000-gallon spill temporarily shut down water supplies in the downstream community of Glendive, Montana, after oil was detected in the city's water treatment system. 
 
 The companies' spills caused combined damage of almost $11 million, with most of that attributed to the Glendive spill, records show. A federal investigation into that spill is pending. 
 
 Kevin Pranis, a spokesman for the Laborers District Council of Minnesota and North Dakota, which represents some workers building the disputed four-state, $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline, said Thursday that regulators need to provide better oversight of the True Cos. 
 
 True Cos. also owns Black Hills Trucking Inc., which is accused of illegally dumping saltwater, a byproduct of oil production, in 2014 on a road in northwestern North Dakota. The three-member North Dakota Industrial Commission that includes Gov. Jack Dalrymple is pursuing $950,000 in fines against Black Hills Trucking, but there has been a dispute over whether the commission has jurisdiction. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Associated Press writer Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana, contributed to this report. ||||| North Dakota, the nation's No. 2 oil producer behind Texas, recorded nearly 300 oil pipeline spills in less than two years, state documents show. None was reported to the public, officials said. 
 
 FILE - In this Oct. 11, 2013 file photo, cleanup continues at the site of an oil pipeline leak and spill north of Tioga, N.D. North Dakota, the nation’s No. 2 oil producer behind Texas, recorded nearly... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Oct. 11, 2013 file photo, cleanup continues at the site of an oil pipeline leak and spill north of Tioga, N.D. North Dakota, the nation’s No. 2 oil producer behind Texas, recorded nearly... (Associated Press) 
 
 According to records obtained by The Associated Press, the pipeline spills _ many of them small _ are among some 750 "oil field incidents" that have occurred since January 2012 without public notification. 
 
 "That's news to us," said Don Morrison, director of the Dakota Resource Council, an environmental-minded landowner group with more than 700 members in North Dakota. 
 
 Dennis Fewless, director of water quality for the state Health Department, said regulators are reviewing the state's policies for when to publicly report such incidents after a massive spill was discovered last month in northwestern North Dakota by a wheat farmer. State and company officials kept it quiet for 11 days _ and only said something after the AP asked about it. 
 
 Soon after the AP published its report Friday, the Health Department announced it is testing a website to publish information on all spills reported to the department. 
 
 North Dakota regulators, like in many other oil-producing states, are not obliged to tell the public about oil spills under state law. But in a state that's producing a million barrels a day and saw nearly 2,500 miles of new pipelines last year, many believe the risk of spills will increase, posing a bigger threat to farmland and water. 
 
 "We're certainly looking at that now and what would be a threshold for reporting to the public," Fewless said. Taking notice of the recent criticism, the state issued a statement Oct. 17 on an estimated 7-barrel oil spill in Divide County, which borders Canada in far northwestern North Dakota. 
 
 The state also is mulling a better system to track spills in-house, Fewless said, from their origin to cleanup status. 
 
 Dave Glatt, chief of the department's environmental health section, said the website announced late Friday would likely go live in two to three weeks. He said officials are still considering how large a spill should trigger a public announcement in addition to being published on the website. 
 
 A spill-tracking system would be valuable for the public, said Louis Kuster, who raises wheat near Stanley in northwest North Dakota. Farmers and ranchers rely on land for their livelihood, so information on spills that could threaten land or water supplies "absolutely is important for us to know," he said. 
 
 Between coffee-shop talk and chatting with neighbors, nothing much happens around the fourth-generation farmer's land without him knowing about it _ except when it comes to oil spills. 
 
 "What you don't know, nobody is going to tell you," Kuster said. 
 
 Earlier this month, Kuster and his neighbors noticed truckloads of oil-tainted dirt being hauled away from an adjacent farm. It was allegedly from a broken pipeline, but no one really knows for sure, he said. 
 
 "We have no idea how big the spill is and why it happened," he said. "I'd try to get more information from the state but I'm too busy getting my harvest in." 
 
 North Dakota officials have urged pipeline industry to officials to quickly _ and safely _ expand the network to keep pace with record production in the oil patch. The state has about 17,500 miles of pipelines, including the addition last year of 2,470 miles, roughly the distance from New York City to Los Angeles. 
 
 For almost two weeks, no one knew about a break in a Tesoro Corp. pipeline that was discovered Sept. 29 in a remote area near Tioga. Officials say no water was contaminated or wildlife hurt, but the spill was one of the largest in North Dakota's history, estimated at 20,600 barrels. Oil oozed over an area the size of seven football fields. 
 
 Records obtained by the AP show that so far this year, North Dakota has recorded 139 pipeline leaks that spilled a total of 735 barrels of oil. In 2012, there were 153 pipeline leaks that spilled 495 barrels of oil, data show. A little more than half of the spills companies reported to North Dakota occurred "on-site," where a well is connected to a pipeline, and most were fewer than 10 barrels. The remainder of the spills occurred along the state's labyrinth of pipelines. 
 
 "The public really should know about these," Morrison with the landowner group said. "If there is a spill, sometimes a landowner may not even know about it. And if they do, people think it's an isolated incident that's only happening to them." 
 
 North Dakota also had 291 "incidents" this year that leaked a total of about 2,209 barrels of oil. Data show that all but 490 barrels were contained and cleaned up at the well site. In 2012, there were 168 spills reported that leaked 1,089 barrels of oil; all but 376 barrels were contained on site, data show. Only one incident _ a crash involving an oil truck last year _ was reported publicly. 
 
 Department of Mineral Resources director Lynn Helms _ the state's top oil regulator _ said regulators worry about "over-reporting" spills. The goal, he said, is to find a balance to so that "the public is aware of what's happening but not overwhelmed by little incidents." 
 
 Kuster believes most people would like to immediately know about even the smallest spill, because even a barrel of spilled oil likely could ruin water sources and take untold acres of cropland out of production. He also said timely, accurate and accessible information would hold companies and regulators accountable. 
 
 "It would tell me if there is enough oversight and why these accidents happen and if they could have been avoided," he said. "Right now, you don't know if there is a spill unless you find it yourself." 
 
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 Follow James MacPherson on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/macphersonja
– Three years and three months later, a massive oil spill in North Dakota still isn't fully cleaned up. The company responsible hasn't even set a date for completion. Though crews have been working around the clock to deal with the Tesoro Corp. pipeline break, which happened in a wheat field in September 2013, less than a third of the 840,000 gallons that spilled has been recovered. While the nearest home was a half-mile away and the state said no water sources were contaminated and no wildlife hurt, one of the largest onshore oil spills recorded in the US serves for some as a cautionary example, especially given a recent pipeline break in Belfield, about 150 miles south, and ongoing debates over the four-state Dakota Access pipeline. Texas-based company Tesoro and federal regulators have said a lightning strike may have caused the 2013 rupture in the pipeline, which runs from Tioga to a rail facility outside of Columbus, near the Canadian border. The cleanup has cost Tesoro more than $49 million to date and is expected to top $60 million, according to recent filings to the state. Crews have had to dig as deep as 50 feet to remove hundreds of thousands of tons of oil-tainted soil, North Dakota Health Department environmental scientist Bill Suess says. The company has now switched to special equipment that cooks hydrocarbons from crude-soaked soil in a process called thermal desorption before putting it back in place. Landowners, not the monitoring equipment in place, discovered both the Tesoro and Belfield breaks, reports the AP.