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| credit: National Geographic |
The defendants in the Gulf Oil spill disaster began presenting their case this week. The plantiffs, which include the federal government and the states of Alabama and Louisiana, planned to call an additional witness, a Hailliburton employee who is expected to testify concerning the stability of the cement slurry used by Halliburton and the records he allegedly was told not to keep. Transocean, which leased its Deepwater Horizon drilling platform to British Petroleum, began presenting evidence Monday. It called a well-control expert as its first witness. He testified that the Deepwater Horizon was a state of the art drilling platform and that the drilling crew was properly trained, contradicting an earlier government witness who said the the rig was poorly maintained and "unseaworthy". The CEO of Transocean also tesitfied on Tuesday. He told the court that his Swiss-based company agreed to plead guilty to federal offshore safety violations, pay $1 billion in Clean Water Act civil penalties and another $400 in criminal fines because he believes the rig's crew "should have done more". The evidence presented so far shows that the cement used to seal the Macondo well was faulty; a Slumberger subsidiary that supplied the drilling fluids filed a motion to have all claims against it dismissed since it contends no evidence has been presented connecting its actions to the cause of the well blowout. Judge Barbier took the request under advisement.
In related action, British Petroleum filed a motion for discovery sanctions against Halliburton for failing to disclose a cement sample possibly from the Macondo well located in its laboratory in Lafayette, Louisiana. BP said in its filling that the failure to disclose the sample "undermined the integrity of [the] proceedings" and entitled it to a ruling that the contractor's cement mix was unstable before the blowout occurred. Alabama's attorneys informed the Judge that it too would seek sanctions.
