If you divide 120,000 by 55 you get 2,182 barrels, which doesn’t sound near as bad. I’m surprised that the media didn’t go with litters, quarts or pints to get an even bigger scarier number.
Roughly 88% of which is fracking water, not oil. Set up a feedlot for a few months and by this time next year, the only evidence anything ever happened will be greener grass.
For the record, the nearest city of Marmarth has a population of less than 150 and is the largest town in the county. The county seat of Amidon is home to 20 people, second smallest county seat in the USA.
Oil field lingo is 42 gallons per barrel, not 55. Number of barrels is 2,857 which is considerable. If it was just in a pasture, cleanup should be fairly easy unless there are groundwater impacts. Clean up the surface area and pay the farmer for damages.
Twenty years ago one of my early clients did not have sensors on a 40,000 barrel tank receiving jet fuel from a pipeline. The terminal manager made an incorrect calculation on how long it would take to fill the tank and went home. He was called back when the neighbors complained about the petroleum odor to find he had flooded the unlined containment area surrounding the tank with jet fuel. The facility was right next to an irrigation ditch and all the residences were on private wells. I spent a couple of months in charge of the clean up and sampling all local wells which fortunately, were in a deeper water bearing zone.
Now the company has installed high level and high-high level alarms on its tanks to avoid just this type of problem. Though a supporter or the industry, it never ceases to amaze me how some simple cost-effect precautions can prevent an incident that will cost many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to mitigate. In addition, it feeds the environutters playbook of how the big bad oil companies are polluting the environment.