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1st criminal charges filed in BP oil spill
Too bad the charges are related to the investigation, rather than the actual spill.
U.S. arrests BP engineer on criminal charges stemming from oil spill
by Steven Mufson, Updated: Tuesday, April 24, 3:36 PM
A former BP drilling engineer was arrested Tuesday on charges of intentionally destroying text messages sought by federal authorities as evidence 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 caused by 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. Eleven men were killed in the explosion that sank the drilling rig.
The charges against Mix are not related to the cause of the blowout or the design of BP?s botched attempts to stop the spill. Nor do they allege any wrongdoing by the company as a matter of policy.
But the charges do point to the question of what BP knew about the flow rate from the Macondo well and whether it had covered up that information. Knowing exactly how fast the oil was leaking into the Gulf of Mexico is important because BP is subject to fines based on the amount of oil spilled.
In the case against Mix, the former engineer allegedly ignored instructions from more senior BP officials and lawyers to preserve evidence. The Justice Department said BP ?sent numerous notices to Mix requiring him to retain all information concerning Macondo, including his text messages.?
BP said in a statement Tuesday 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.?
But the case against Mix raises further questions about who knew what, and when.
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 plug the leak. Those included, among other strategies, Top Kill, BP?s failed attempt to pump heavy drilling mud into the wellhead to try to stop the oil flow.
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 in statement. ?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, the Justice Department said. In the text, Mix stated, among other things, ?Too much flowrate ? over 15,000,? the agency said. Before the Top Kill effort, Mix and other engineers had concluded internally that Top Kill probably wouldn?t work if the flow rate was greater than 15,000 barrels of oil a day.
At the time, BP had not changed its public estimate that the flow rate was about 5,000 barrels a day. Earlier during that day, BP then-chief executive Tony Hayward had said that ?the operation is proceeding as we planned it.? The company did not announce that the Top Kill effort had failed for three more days, on May 29.
Eventually, federal regulators estimated that the average flow rate during the 87-day spill was more than 50,000 barrels a day.
In the other charge against Mix, the Justice Department alleged that the engineer later deleted a text string containing more than 100 messages between him and a BP contractor he had worked with ?on various issues concerning how much oil was flowing from the Macondo well after the blowout.?
?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.
During the time of the spill, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, was a lead critic of BP and its estimates of the rate at which oil was leaking into the Gulf of Mexico. On Tuesday, he issued a statement saying that the case against Mix ?raises additional questions about what the company knew about the size of the spill at the time, and whether the company may have had reason to know that the ?Top Kill? effort to plug the well could not succeed.?
Markey left it up to the courts to decide the case but said that ?we already know that BP had a policy of obfuscation during the spill when it came to the amount of oil flowing out of the Macondo well.?
Two years after the catastrophe, Markey said, BP ?is still challenging the size of the spill to reduce their own liability and fines. It is not surprising that there may be instances where BP employees tried to cover up their tracks, when billions of dollars in fines are at stake that should be paid to the American people.?
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