U.S. charges ex-bp engineer in Gulf of Mexico spill probe
A former BP PLC engineer was arrested and charged on Tuesday with intentionally destroying evidence related to how much oil was spilling from the company’s broken well in the Gulf of Mexico in April of 2010, the U.S. Justice Department said.
Kurt Mix, 50, was accused of deleting text messages between him and a supervisor that included “sensitive internal BP information collected in real-time” as BP tried to stop the leak, the Justice Department said.
Mix was charged with two counts of obstruction of justice for allegedly deleting records related to the amount of oil flowing from the Macondo well after the blowout. If convicted, he faces a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each count.
The spill was found after BP’S troublesome Macondo deepwater well blew out, causing deadly explosions aboard Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that killed 11 men and sank the rig.
The biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history spewed more than 4 million barrels of oil into the basin before BP capped it in mid-july 2010. The company killed the well two months later.
Mix, a drilling and completions engineer for BP before he resigned in January this year, worked on various efforts to stop the leak, including a “top kill” that involved pumping heavy mud into the ruptured well to try to push back the oil.
Prosecutors alleged that when Mix learned his electronic files were going to be collected by a vendor working for BP’S lawyers, he deleted hundreds of text messages to a BP drilling engineering manager and an outside contractor — both unidentified in court papers — about the top kill that indicated it was failing. At the same time, top BP officials said publicly that it was “broadly proceeding according to plan.”