Update re: court appearance of Kurt Mix.
In a statement Tuesday afternoon, BP said it would have no comment on the charges against Mix, and that it “is cooperating with the Department of Justice and other official investigations into the Deepwater Horizon accident and oil spill.”
“BP had clear policies requiring preservation of evidence in this case and has undertaken substantial and ongoing efforts to preserve evidence,” the statement said.
Mix appeared Tuesday afternoon in Houston before U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith, who freed Smith on $100,000 bail and ordered him to stay in Texas or Louisiana. Smith ordered Mix to appear May 3 in U.S. District Court in New Orleans.
Mix said nothing in court, and his lawyer, David Gerger, declined comment after the hearing.
On Wednesday, a federal judge in New Orleans is expected to consider a motion to approve a $7.8 billion civil settlement between BP and a committee of plaintiffs in a civil case.
As we all remember, there was much discussion about how much oil was flowing from the BP gusher immediately after the blowout, from an abysmally low 1,000 barrels per day, up to 80+ thousand barrels.
However, some apparently had more working knowledge - and one of those with the information was BP drilling and completions project engineer Kurt Mix. Now no longer employed by BP, Mix knew that a high rate of flow - above 15,000 barrels per day - would negate any efforts with the "top kill" procedure of pushing heavy drilling mud into the pipe and surrounding casing. It just wouldn't work.
According to the Justice Department, Mix was told by BP to save all of the information he had acquired relating to top kill, including more than 200 text messages. But...he didn't.
As per the DOJ document...
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, Mix allegedly deleted on his iPhone a text string containing more than 200 text messages with a BP supervisor. 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. Court documents allege that, among other things, Mix deleted a text he had sent on the evening of May 26, 2010, at the end of the first day of Top Kill. In the text, Mix stated, among other things, “Too much flowrate – over 15,000.” Before Top Kill commenced, 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 per day (BOPD). At the time, BP’s public estimate of the flow rate was 5,000 BOPD – three times lower than the minimum flow rate indicated in Mix’s text.
In addition, on or about Aug. 19, 2011, after learning that his iPhone was about to be imaged by a vendor working for BP’s outside counsel, Mix allegedly deleted a text string containing more than 100 text messages with a BP contractor with whom Mix had worked 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.
Is it live...or is it Memorex? Was it Mix himself, or was it on BP's orders? Inquiring minds want to know...
How high was the flow rate, actually? Top kill sure as hell didn't work. Neither did the "junk shot". By then BP was really grasping at straws...at least the ones they weren't trying to stuff down the blown-out hole.
Yeah, as someone stated earlier, this is low-hanging fruit. But there are indications that a bunch of those apples are not falling far from the tree.
And although he might not have the cojones he once had (well, better cojones than others...) our "man in Washington" at least is saying the right things...
"The courts will determine whether these actions were an obstruction of justice, but 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," said U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee.
"Two years after the BP spill, the company is still challenging the size of the spill to reduce their own liability and fines," Markey said. "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."
Will Rep. Markey or anyone ever get to the bottom (or top) of this? Probably not in our lifetimes. But hey, it's a start...maybe... |