Norton!

One of the last holdovers from the first-term cabinet is resigning.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton is resigning after five years in President Bush's Cabinet, The Associated Press has learned.

Norton, a former Colorado attorney general who guided the Bush administration's initiative to open Western government lands to more oil and gas drilling, planned to announce her decision Friday, a senior government official and another source familiar with her decision told the AP.

Norton told associates she wanted to return to private life in Colorado, the source said.

Norton was the most oil-and-gas-company-friendly Interior Secretary in many a decade. She crusaded for drilling in ANWR to no avail, but succeeded in obtaining drilling permits all over New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming.

She also had Indian tribal lands under her purview, and so she has a passing familiarity with one Jack Abramoff, to the tune of $50,000 and a few pictures. Her top deputy Steven Griles is embroiled in the scandal pretty deeply:

Norton cleared her top deputy, former lobbyist J. Steven Griles, after her inspector general said his conduct showed that the department’s ethics system was “a train wreck waiting to happen.” Griles is now under investigation for allegations that he did the bidding of convicted Indian casino lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Norton is still supporting him.

So did Gale Norton head for the exits before Justice Department officials came knocking on her door asking about her Abramoff connections? Or was it because of something simpler, like, I don't know, the largest ever oil spill on Alaska's North Slope:

More than 200,000 gallons of crude leaked from a ruptured transit line onto the tundra in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, making the spill discovered earlier this month the largest ever on the North Slope, according to an official estimate released Friday.

The estimated spill size of 202,000 to 267,000 gallons far surpasses the 38,000 gallons spilled in 2001, officials said. By comparison, the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons when it ran aground in Prince William Sound in 1989.

“I can confirm it’s the largest spill of crude oil on the North Slope that we have record of,” said Linda Giguere with the state Department of Environmental Conservation. She did not immediately know when the state began record keeping on spills, but said it was not in place when the trans-Alaska oil pipeline was built in the 1970s.

The estimate on the largest spill was based on a survey conducted this week at the site operated by BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc. where the leak was discovered March 2. Workers took measurements by probing the snow covering much of the crude that leaked from the 34-inch line.

The source of the spill was a quarter-inch hole apparently caused by internal corrosion in the three-mile line that leads to the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

I actually saw the Trans-Alaska pipeline back in October. It's quite an amazing technological marvel, but I'm surprised stuff like this doesn't happen more often. It's so desolate, and in that harsh an environment holes could open up so easily without detection.

But an oil spill of that size is grave and dangerous. And maybe Norton doesn't want to be around for the fallout.