It's been a long time coming. Via Raw Story
The US justice department has made the first arrest in connection with the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, charging a former engineer with destroying evidence relating to the amount of oil gushing from BP’s stricken well.
Two years after the 20 April 2010 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, the justice department said it had charged Kurt Mix with obstruction of justice for allegedly deleting hundreds of text messages relating to BP’s early unsuccessful efforts to plug the well. Mix, 50, was a drilling and project engineer on the Deepwater Horizon. After the oil rig went down, he was part of the team trying to stop the leak, according to court documents.
You mean to say that the Government now knows that the original claim that only 1,000 Barrels of Oil/Day were spewing out of the Deep Water Well despite BP's claims, and they've actually
caught someone in the lie.
But it couldn't have been just this one guy could it?
Apparently Not.
According to an affidavit filed in his case, a team of BP scientists and engineers, including Mix, decided on 18 May 2010, nearly a month after the blowout, that a top kill could possibly work if the flow rate of oil was about 5,000 barrels per day, which was BP’s estimate at the time.
Internal BP data suggested that a top kill would fail if the flow rate was 15,000 barrels per day or more.
And it did fail, and it seems that Mix knew it would fail because on May 26th, the day they had planned to attempt the "Top Kill" he texted "too much flowrate – over 15,000 and too large an orifice".
That's what he tried to delete. To me it seem ironic that his attempt to warn them that the Top Kill would fail is what has landed him in criminal jeopardy, not the fact that they ignored him just to save face and wasted valuable days on a pointless boondogle.
It was just last week that BP reached at $7.8 Billion settlement for financial and health issues related to the spill impacting 100,000. A settlement that still hasn't made that many in the Gulf satisfied. Certainly not the Shrimpers.
Shrimp processing factories had made great strides in working with Gulf Coast Claims Facility Administrator Ken Feinberg toward a formula that they felt would fairly and effectively compensate them for their losses from the BP oil spill. But Eddy Hayes, an attorney for the American Shrimp Processors Association, said that the settlement filed in court last week between BP and plaintiff attorneys erases all the progress that had been made, because it uses some of the very same approaches that the group had been trying to get Feinberg to abandon.
And then there's the Mutant Fish Problem.
I find it a bit ironic that the first person to go to jail following the BP disaster which killed nearly a dozen people, will be for deleting a text message, not for causing shrimp without eyes.
Where exactly is the justice in that?
And here's the thing: I don't see how Mix would benefit from deleting that message. It doesn't make him look bad. It doesn't hurt him. So what's the motivation other than protecting BP, which again leads me to consider - perhaps he didn't make that decision on his own, and if not his arrest may simply be an attempt to get him to cooperate and tell us who within BP is so afraid of the truth?
Vyan