VERNAL — Federal officials have arrived at the scene of a pipeline break that has spilled an estimated 59,000 gallons of crude oil.

Paul Peronard with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Denver said two EPA on-scene coordinators are following up with a contractor hired by Chevron Pipeline Co. to ensure the spill is being cleaned up properly.

"There's somewhere around a mile of ditch or drainage that has oil in it," Peronard said. "In this case, what we're actually going to try to do is burn it off, do what's called an 'in situ burn.' It's a practice that's gotten a lot more common in the last five years."

Peronard said burning is preferable to the damage done by excavating such a large section of a drainage and hauling away the contaminated soil; however, the EPA is asking the cleanup company to first explore the possibility of finding a location to land farm the soil.

Darrin Brown, director of environmental health for the TriCounty Health Department, told the Deseret News on Friday that state air quality officials are unlikely to grant a burn permit for the site because of existing atmospheric conditions.

"The clearing index has to be above 500 and they're going to have a hard time finding that," Brown said. "The reason for that is to get rid of the smoke and right now the smoke won't go up, it'll just fill the area where they're at."

The spill left puddles of oil on the ground that began to thicken in the subfreezing temperatures. That allowed crews using vacuum trucks to collect much of the standing oil, but the spill area is covered by snow, making it difficult to identify how far the oil has spread.

"It's going to take a lot of excavation to clean this up," Brown told the Deseret News on Thursday night.

The spill from the 3-inch, underground line is located on Bureau of Land Management land 33 miles south of Vernal and one mile west of Deseret Power's Bonanza Power Plant.

Chevron Pipeline spokesman Mickey Driver said the rupture was detected by the company's monitoring system, which noted a drop in pressure at about 11 p.m. Tuesday.

"Pressure dropped on the line and we immediately shut it in," he said. "We immediately dispatched our response crews there to begin looking at the situation and to begin cleanup."

The damaged pipeline is part of the Salt Lake Crude System that feeds into the refineries on the Wasatch Front.

Driver declined to speculate on what caused the pipeline to break. A comment on the Deseret News' Web site attributed the break to a third-party who was digging without a permit and struck the pipeline.

"We've seen that, but until we investigate we really don't know," Driver said when asked about the anonymous comment. "Until we have hard facts we're not going to say anything other than 'We're investigating it."'

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E-mail: geoff@ubstandard.com