Former BP Engineer Criminal Charges, A former BP drilling engineer was arrested Tuesday on charges of intentionally destroying evidence sought by federal authorities in the wake of the April 20, 2010, Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster, the Justice Department said.
The two charges of obstruction of justice filed against Kurt Mix, in the Eastern District of Louisiana, are the first criminal charges connected to the oil spill that resulted from a blowout on BP’s Macondo well. If found guilty, Mix could face up to 20 years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines for each count.
It remains unclear whether other criminal charges are to follow — one of the main uncertainties hanging over the London-based oil giant as it tries to pay settlements and move past the disaster, which was the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
In the case against Mix, the former engineer allegedly ignored instructions from more senior BP officials and lawyers. The company said in a statement that it is cooperating with the Justice Department and that it “had clear policies requiring preservation of evidence in this case and has undertaken substantial and ongoing efforts to preserve evidence.”
The Justice Department said that after the blowout, Mix worked to estimate the amount of oil leaking from the well and was involved in the company’s efforts to stop the leak. Those included, among other strategies, Top Kill, the failed BP effort to pump heavy drilling mud and other debris into the wellhead to try to stop the oil flow.
The Justice Department said BP “sent numerous notices to Mix requiring him to retain all information concerning Macondo, including his text messages.” But on or about Oct. 4, 2010, after Mix learned that his electronic files were to be collected by a vendor working for BP’s lawyers, he deleted from his iPhone “a text string containing more than 200 text messages with a BP supervisor,” the Justice Department alleged. “The deleted texts, some of which were recovered forensically, included sensitive internal BP information collected in real-time as the Top Kill operation was occurring, which indicated that Top Kill was failing.”
Mix deleted a text he had sent on the evening of May 26, 2010, at the end of the first day of Top Kill, a Justice Department statement alleged. In the text, Mix stated, among other things, “Too much flowrate – over 15,000,” the statement said. Before the Top Kill effort, Mix and other engineers had concluded internally that Top Kill was unlikely to succeed if the flow rate was greater than 15,000 barrels of oil a day. At the time, BP’s public estimate of the flow rate was 5,000 barrels a day.
Eventually, federal regulators estimated that the average flow rate during the 87-day spill was more than 50,000 barrels a day.
In addition, Mix allegedly later deleted a text string containing more than 100 messages between him and a BP contractor he had worked “on various issues concerning how much oil was flowing from the Macondo well after the blowout,” the Justice Department said.
“By the time Mix deleted those texts, he had received numerous legal hold notices requiring him to preserve such data and had been communicating with a criminal defense lawyer in connection with the pending grand jury investigation of the Deepwater Horizon disaster,” the agency said.
Source:http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/us-arrests-bp-engineer-on-criminal-charges-stemming-from-oil-spill/2012/04/24/gIQA7TsoeT_story.html
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