Two years after oil from a BP well began gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Department of Justice has filed criminal charges alleging that a former BP employee destroyed critical evidence in the early days of the unfolding disaster.

The charges are the first to be filed in what the Obama administration has called the worst environmental disaster in American history, and they are significant because they target an individual employee for his actions.

According to an affidavit and complaint filed Tuesday, April 24 in a Louisiana court, Kurt Mix, a former drilling and completions engineer, deleted email and text messages he had sent to senior BP managers estimating that the amount of oil spewing into the Gulf was many times greater than the amount stated publicly. Mix was specifically instructed by attorneys contracted by BP to retain his records before he deleted them, the affidavit states.

In a statement released to reporters, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder indicated that more charges are likely, describing the indictment as “initial charges” in an ongoing investigation, and saying that the Department of Justice “will hold accountable those who violated the law.”

More than 200 million gallons of crude oil flowed into the Gulf of Mexico after a blowout caused the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the death of 11 workers on April 20, 2010. The spill continued, unabated, for nearly three months. Analysts have long expected criminal charges against BP or its employees.

A spokeswoman for the agency declined to say when more charges might be expected, or to explain why the case against Mix was the first to be made public.

Mix could not be reached for comment, and we were unable to leave him a message because his voicemail was full.

BP issued a statement saying that the company was cooperating with federal investigators and that “BP had clear policies requiring preservation of evidence in this case and has undertaken substantial and ongoing efforts to preserve evidence.”

According to an FBI affidavit submitted to the court along with the indictment, Mix, who worked for BP until January 2012, was directly involved in BP’s efforts to understand how much oil was flowing out of the broken Macondo well. On April 21, 2010, Mix estimated that between 68,000 and 138,000 barrels of oil were leaking each day — far more than the 5,000 barrels that were estimated publicly at the time.

On April 22, Mix received the first of six legal notices instructing him to retain his electronic records.

Yet, according to the affidavit, in early October, Mix allegedly deleted a string of more than 200 text messages on his iPhone that he had sent to a supervisor. The deleted texts, which the Department of Justice said were recovered forensically, included sensitive — and pessimistic — internal BP information sent while the company was attempting what it called a “Top Kill” effort to stop the gushing oil on May 26, 2010.

Mix wrote that the effort — which he was directly involved in — was unlikely to succeed. “Too much flowrate — over 15,000 and too large an orifice. Pumped over 12,800 bbl of mud today plus 5 separate bridging pills. Tired. Going home and getting ready for round three tomorrow.”

At the time, BP said publicly that the measure had a 70 percent chance of success.

Mix, 50, was arrested in Katy, Texas on April 24. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 on each of the two counts he is charged with.

by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica, April 24, 2012, 5:16 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   IBRRC

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This story was published as an op-ed in The New York Times.

Two years after a series of gambles and ill-advised decisions on a BP drilling project led to the largest accidental oil spill in United States history and the death of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, no one has been held accountable.

Sure, there have been about $8 billion in payouts and, in early March, the outlines of a civil agreement that will cost BP, the company ultimately responsible, another $7.8 billion in restitution to businesses and residents along the Gulf of Mexico. It’s also true the company has paid at least $14 billion more in cleanup and other costs since the accident began on April 20, 2010, bringing the expense of this fiasco to about $30 billion for BP. These are huge numbers. But this is a huge and profitable corporation.

What is missing is the accountability that comes from real consequences: a criminal prosecution that holds responsible the individuals who gambled with the lives of BP’s contractors and the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico. Only such an outcome can rebuild trust in an oil industry that asks for the public’s faith so that it can drill more along the nation’s coastlines. And perhaps only such an outcome can keep BP in line and can keep an accident like the Deepwater Horizon disaster from happening again.

BP has already tested the effectiveness of lesser consequences, and its track record proves that the most severe punishments the courts and the United States government have been willing to mete out amount to a slap on the wrist.

Prior to the gulf blowout, which spilled 200 million gallons of oil, BP was convicted of two felony environmental crimes and a misdemeanor: after it failed to report that its contractors were dumping toxic waste in Alaska in 1995; after its refinery in Texas City, Texas, exploded, killing 15, in 2005; and after it spilled more than 200,000 gallons of crude oil from a corroded pipeline onto the Alaskan tundra in 2006. In all, more than 30 people employed directly or indirectly by BP have died in connection with these and other recent accidents.

In at least two of those cases, the company had been warned of human and environmental dangers, deliberated the consequences and then ignored them, according to my reporting.

None of the upper-tier executives who managed BP 2014 John Browne and Tony Hayward among them 2014 were malicious. Their decisions, however, were driven by money. Neither their own sympathies nor the stark risks in their operations 2014 corroding pipelines, dysfunctional safety valves, disarmed fire alarms and so on 2014 could compete with the financial necessities of profit making.

Before the accident in Texas City, BP had declined to spend $150,000 to fix a part of the system that allowed gasoline to spew into the air and blow up. Documents show that the company had calculated the cost of a human life to be $10 million. Shortly before that disaster, a senior plant manager warned BP’s London headquarters that the plant was unsafe and a disaster was imminent. A report from early 2005 predicted that BP’s refinery would kill someone “within the next 12 to 18 months” unless it changed its practices.

Such explicit flirtation with deadly risk was undertaken as part of Mr. Browne’s effort while chief executive to expand BP as quickly as possible. Mr. Browne relentlessly cut costs, including on maintenance and safety.

Then he hastily assembled a series of acquisitions and mergers between 1998 and 2001 that added tens of thousands of employees, blurred chains of command and wrought chaos on his operations. His methods 2014 and the demands of Wall Street 2014 became overly dependent on quantitative measures of success at the expense of environmental and human risk.

After each disaster, Mr. Browne pledged to refresh his focus on safety, investment in maintenance and commitment to the environment. His successor, Mr. Hayward, followed suit, saying that BP’s culture had to change. But the Deepwater Horizon tragedy 2014 which bears many of the same traits as the company’s past accidents 2014 shows how difficult it has been for the company’s leaders to shift BP’s corporate values and live up to their promises.

The question becomes: did they try hard enough, and did the mechanisms of oversight, regulation and law enforcement work sufficiently to provide a recidivist organization the deterrent that could guarantee its compliance?

After its previous convictions, BP paid unprecedented fines 2014 more than $70 million 2014 and committed to spend at least another $800 million on maintenance to improve safety. The point was to demonstrate that the cost of doing business wrong far outweighs the cost of doing business right.

But without personal accountability, the fines become just another cost of doing business, William Miller, a former investigator for the Environmental Protection Agency who was involved in the Texas City case, told me.

The problem then (and perhaps now) is that it is the slow pileup of factors that cause an industrial disaster. Poor decisions are usually made incrementally by a range of people with differing levels of responsibility, and almost always behind a shield of plausible deniability. It makes it almost impossible to pin one clear-cut bad call on a single manager, which is partly why no BP official has ever been held criminally accountable.

Instead, the corporation is held accountable. It isn’t clear that charging the company repeatedly with misdemeanors and felonies has accomplished anything.

At more than $30 billion and climbing, the amount BP has paid out so far for reparations, lawsuits and cleanup dwarfs the roughly $8 billion that Exxon had to pay after its 1989 spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska. And BP will likely still pay billions more before this is finished.

And yet it is not enough. Two years after analysts questioned whether the extraordinary cost and loss of confidence might drive BP out of business, it has come roaring back. It collected more than $375 billion in 2011, pocketing $26 billion in profits.

What the gulf spill has taught us is that no matter how bad the disaster (and the environmental impact), the potential consequences have never been large enough to dissuade BP from placing profits ahead of prudence. That might change if a real person was forced to take responsibility 2014 or if the government brought down one of the biggest hammers in its arsenal and banned the company from future federal oil leases and permits altogether. Fines just don’t matter.

by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica, April 19, 2012, 8 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   Albert H. Teich / Shutterstock.com

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The energy company CronocoPhillips and their Chinese section has not effectively stopped or cleaned up offshore spills in the Bohai Bay, according to China’s Oceanic Agency. The spills, which occurred on June 4 and June 17, releasing approximately 700 barrels of oil into Bohai Bay and 2,500 barrels of mineral oil-based drilling mud onto the seabed, have raised an outcry among environmentalists.

The State Oceanic Administration said its investigation discovered that the company had failed to completely clean up damage from the spills and to ensure leaks would not recur. The agency also ordered the company to halt all gas and oil production in the area off China’s eastern coast, until effective measures are taken to prevent further oil leaks as well as ensure that any remaining spills are completely removed.

It also called for a full environmental impact assessment before production can be resumed. CronocoPhillips said it was drawing up a compliance plan along with its partner in the Bohai Bay, China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC). “Activities that are related to depressurizing the field will continue in a safe and environmentally responsible way,” it said in a statement released by CronocoPhillips at the beginning of September.

CronocoPhillips China holds a 49 percent stake in the venture in the Penglai 19-3 oil field, being its sole operator, with CNOOC holding 51 percent. Both companies have publicly apologized for the incident. Initially, CronocoPhillips reported that the spills have been entirely removed. The company also said the fault causing the leak was sealed and that the situation was basically under control.

Despite the companys reassuring statements, the State Oceanic Administration and the Chinese press clearly expressed its dissatisfaction towards the manner in which the oil giant has handled the problem. The People’s Daily severely criticized the company, saying that CronocoPhillips issued misleading statements over the spills while displaying “indifference” over the harm caused to the environment.

According to the publication, CronocoPhillips strove more to protect its image and did not put enough effort into safeguarding the environment after the spill was made public in early June. “There is a sharp contrast between the company’s sensitivity regarding its image and its indifference to the pollution,” People’s Daily commentator Jiang Hongbing said in unambiguous terms.

“After repeated delays and a series of cover-ups and deceptions, production at the Penglai 19-3 oil field has finally been ordered to stop.” The government also says that the spills spread up to 5,5000 square kilometers(2,124 miles) and may have killed scallops.

CronocoPhillips declared that damage to the marine environment was minimized and that oil traces discovered onshore were not related to the spills but were from fuel in the water. The comments made by the oceanic administration at the beginning of September suggest a clash of opinions over how to handle the seeps.

It is believed that pressure had built up underground due to injections used to help force oil from the wells. The notice issued by China’s Oceanic Agency ordered CronocoPhillips to accept CNOOC’S “strict supervision” in preventing further spills and recently has also threatened to sue the company.

Environmental groups complained about the slow pace of the cleaning operations, while fishermen in Shandong, Hebei and Liaoning provinces claim that oil has killed off most marine life. Another consequence of the incident was a drop in CNOOC’s shares in early September, which fell 8.8 percent in Hong Kong.
Lorraine Kourafas / Shutterstock.com

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A federal judge on Thursday ruled in favor of Transocean and BP oil, dismissing third-party environmental claims in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill litigation. The judge claimed that the fact that the oil flow has stopped makes those lawsuits irrelevant.

“The injunction at this stage would be useless, as not only is there no ongoing release from the well, but there is also no viable offshore facility from which any release could possibly occur,” U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier wrote. “The Macondo well is dead, and what remains of the Deepwater Horizon vessel is on the ocean floor, where it capsized and sank in 5,000 feet of water.

“Moreover, BP and the agencies comprising the Unified Area Command have been and are cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico. An injury is not redressable by a citizen suit when the injury is already being addressed.”

Federal Judge Barbier is overseeing the massive, consolidated oil spill litigation, which has been divided into “bundles,” based upon the nature of the claims. The D1 bundles were lawsuits filed by third part environmental groups. D1 bundle alleges that the spill caused environmental damages under the Clean Water Act; the Endangered Species Act; the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act; and the Emergency Planning and Community Right-To-Know Act.

More than 100,000 people have filed lawsuits related to the massive deepwater oil spill. Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, operated by BP, exploded and burned 50 miles off the Louisiana coast on April 20, 2010, killing 11 and setting off the worst oil spill in history. Millions of gallons of oil were spilled in the next 87 days.

Judge Barbier claims that the plaintiffs must prove ongoing violations, which it cannot because the oil is no longer spilling.  ”The fundamental argument is that this is all moot because the well is sealed,” Barbier said.

During the hearing, Ervin Gonzales, of the plaintiff steering committee, said the cleanup has not been adequate and “the environment is suffering.”  Greg Buppert, an attorney for Defenders of Wildlife, told Barbier at the hearing that “the Endangered Species Act is not linked to the well spill; it is linked to the take of species.”

In response, Barbier cited the federal government’s investigation of the spill. Federal attorneys have said that criminal charges will be filed if the investigation turns up evidence of willful negligence by the defendants.  Because of the continuing investigation, the government has tried to keep certain issues undercover. For instance, autopsy results of the hundreds of dead baby dolphins that have washed up along the Gulf Coast have been kept private, and independent scientists have not been allowed to conduct their own autopsies.

Image Courtesy of  http://www.flickr.com/photos/derek_b/

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Although originally estimated at far less, the dead and dying dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico have continued to grow.  At least 138 dolphins have been found dead this year, nearly half of them newborn or premature calves.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, scientists say. Many more dolphins are dying in the Gulf than are officially counted. New research released last month suggests that the average number for most species may be 50 times higher than what’s currently being reported.  And that is a conservative estimate according to researchers.  What this means is that just in 2011, more than 6,500 dolphins have died.  For some species of the mammal, that rate is 250 times higher than normal.

The media continues to downplay the environmental impact of the BP oil disaster last year.  The Obama administration is readily handing out offshore drilling permits again and our collective memory has been wiped clean of the months-long disaster that shot millions of oil into the Gulf.   The media and proponents of offshore drilling have pointed to the low numbers of wildlife and mammal mortalities immediately after the spill as a justification for the continued oil presence in the Gulf.  Even though it is nearly a year later, it difficult to conceive of another reason for the dramatically large increase in dolphin deaths.

National Resources Defense Council’s Michael Jasny talked about the dangerous long term effects of the large number of dead dolphins in his blog following the release of the research.  “This frightening math makes determining the provenance of the 130 stranded animals all the more urgent.  As I’ve said before, the dolphin communities that have made their homes in the Gulf’s bays, sounds, and estuaries are small and semi-isolated, and the death of even a few babies can have outsized effects on the group.  The shelf and offshore populations are larger but not vast, and the death of hundreds, let alone thousands, of animals would far exceed the government’s estimate of what they can reasonably sustain. “

A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokeswoman said the agency is looking at the new data, but that it has always pointed out that the true number of dead mammals is much higher than what washes onshore. “We’ve been saying for a long time, a lot of marine mammals die in the ocean that we never will see.”  There are many reasons that the deaths of marine mammals are not readily identified.  Primarily sea mammals this size that die are quickly consumed by other predator fish or sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Identifying a cause of death for the dolphins could potentially take months, even with the what-seems- obvious large oil spill in the background.  Oil exposure can disrupt the reproduction in animals.  However, the increase in deaths could be due to an infectious disease, their mothers’ exposure to unrelated toxins, or a host of other possible explanations.

Whatever the case may be, it seems clear that even though it has been a year since the oil spill—the far-reaching consequences still are not fully known and likely will not for many years.

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The government and the media have convinced the majority of Americans that the oil spilled from last year’s BP oil disaster simply disappeared.  The devastating effects the oil has had on the environment have been largely ignored.  Dead sea turtles are the most recent casualty of the growing number of fish, animals, and birds that have begun washing up on the Gulf coast in recent weeks.

Shirley Tillman, a resident of coastal Mississippi, says that a trip to the beach is no longer relaxing.  “It’s very upsetting,” says Shirley, a grandmother.  “I have never found anything like this until after the oil spill. It used to be if you found a dead dolphin or turtle it was front page news around here. Now it’s no big deal.”

Along with the record number of dead dolphins, Gulfport’s Institute for Marine Mammal Studies reports it has collected 38 dead or stranded turtles in Mississippi this year, most in the past few weeks. The turtle tissue samples are turned over to the The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), which does necropsies and further testing.

NMFS is investigating the deaths of these turtles and has increased surveillance, according to Blair Mase-Guthrie, a southeast regional stranding coordinator. “We are treating this very seriously,” she said. Possible causes could range from infectious disease, sudden shifts in water temperature, biotoxins such as red tide or the impact from the BP oil that polluted the area. “We’re not ruling out any factor.”

An NMFS spokeswoman in Washington stated that turtle strandings tend to happen in the spring.  NMFS records show that there have been 13 turtle strandings in Mississippi so far and that number will likely rise as databases are updated.  Even 13 dead turtles are an unusually high number for March.  In the past three years, there were no turtles stranded in Mississippi until the beginning of April.  In Texas, the situation is even grimmer.  There have been 48 turtle deaths on shore this year, more than twice the number in 2009.  After the BP blowout, the total number of on-shore turtle deaths in the Gulf shot up to 248, five times the number from the previous year.

Meanwhile coastal residents are becoming frustrated at the lack of response from their community. “I’m really mad. I’m finding dead turtles, birds, giant fish and other animals all over the beach. No one comes by to clean them up right away and people come down here and let their kids play next to them,” Tillman said.  “And the water looks like chicken broth.”

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Less than a year following the worst oil spill in history, the Obama administration has begun to hand out permits to allow oil companies to resume deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.  Trying to please both “drill, baby, drill” proponents along with environmental advocacy groups, President Obama has assured Americans that the safety standards have somehow improved; that a disaster like what happened last April will not happen again.

“My administration is encouraging offshore oil exploration and production as long as it‘s safe and responsible.  I don‘t think anybody here has forgotten what happened last year, where we had to deal with the largest oil spill in history.  I know some of the fishermen on the Gulf Coast haven‘t forgotten,” Obama recently stated.  “And what we learned from that disaster helped us put in place smarter standards of safety and responsibility.  For example, if you‘re going to drill in deepwater, you‘ve got to prove before you start drilling that you can actually contain an underwater spill.  That‘s just common sense.”

Despite those assurances and some investigation into the disaster last year, nothing has changed.  Oil companies have not done anything to change their operation and their ability to contain an underwater spill.  The main safety mechanism to prevent the kind of blow out that happened is called a blowout preventer.  Clever name, right?  This piece of equipment is designed so that if a well blows out and the pressure from the under seafloor blows into the pipe, the blowout preventer is supposed to seal up the well, holding the pressure and the oil in.  That is what is supposed to happen.  That is not what happened in the case of the BP spill.

As part of its investigation into the BP disaster, the government hired a Norwegian firm to perform a forensic examination of what went wrong with the blowout preventer at Deepwater Horizon.  What this firm discovered was that nothing was wrong with the blowout preventer on the Deepwater Horizon.  It was used properly and there were no defects.  The researchers found that even when these blowout preventers worked as designed, they don’t work.  The pressure they are designed to keep in also can blow out the blowout preventer.

The report calls for all sorts of new studies on blowout preventers and says, quote, “the findings of this study should be considered and addressed in the design of future blowout preventers and the need for modifying current blowout preventers.”

Even after this report was issued, a report that the government had specifically requested, the Obama administration continues to issue permits for deepwater drilling.  The government has also continued to promise the public that the drilling is now safe.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show was able to obtain a copy of the oil spill response plan for the first deepwater permit issued by the Obama administration since the big spill.  The permit was issued for a well operated by Noble Energy whose largest owner is BP.  Even more astounding is that their oil spill response plan was dated September 2009- 8 months before the BP spill.  So what exactly new safety standards is the Obama administration talking about?

Any lesson that was learned from the BP oil spill is not being used to make anything safer.  The administration has been downplaying the significance of the old safety plan being used while they are touting some great new safety lessons.  The Interior Department says that companies are allowed to go forward with permits as they update old emergency schemes.  They claim that there are other safety measures that are they can’t tell us..

Even with all these new facts that have emerged, the administration continues to sell the idea that things have somehow changed.  More than a week after the information was revealed about the blowout preventers; Energy Secretary Steven Chu praised energy companies for improving safety measures for offshore drilling.  He said the companies have provided the government with newly required plans to contain any spill that might take place.  “That’s why you’re seeing a dramatic increase in the licenses being issued in the past months,” he said.

What newly required plans is he talking about?  There were big important lessons that could have been learned after the Deepwater disaster last year.  Just issuing a moratorium on drilling and then letting oil companies drill the same way is not only reckless, it is not using “common sense.”  As we continue to see ongoing consequences from the disaster, the oil companies and the GOP have pressured the Obama administration to cave and issue these deepwater drilling permits at a quick pace despite some real concerns about safety.  There is nothing to stop another spill that also cost 11 workers their lives.  Nothing at all.  It is happening in Japan with the nuclear crisis, it happened in the Gulf, and it happened on Wall Street.  Corporations cannot regulate themselves because it doesn’t work.  Even if it makes people mad, sometimes it is better to be cautious and ensure that there are safety nets in place for any disaster.  It is better to deal with that before the crisis then after.

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