For five days or more, crude oil oozed from a pipeline through a corrosion hole about the size of a pencil eraser, silently spreading underneath the snow in what would become the biggest spill ever on Alaska’s North Slope.

Ultimately it wasn’t the pipeline’s leak-detection systems that discovered the spill. It was an oil-field worker who smelled oil.

[Read](http://fredericksburg.com//News/FLS/2006/032006/03182006/176476) (Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star)