More than 100 workers are busily cleaning up a 285,600-gallon oil spill outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, that began Thursday when a man fired a .338 caliber rifle at the trans-Alaskan pipeline. About a third of the spilled oil has been recovered, but a representative of the company managing the cleanup said it would be years before the area is free of contamination. Although the pipeline — which carries about 17 percent of the oil produced in the nation, or about 1 million barrels per day — has been hit by gun and rifle fire more than 50 times in its history, it had never been punctured prior to last week.
