Ex-BP Engineer Criminally Charged

A former BP engineer was criminally charged under suspicion of destroying evidence regarding the Deepwater Horizon oil platform more than two years after the infamous 2010 spill in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.
Kurt Mix, 50, was charged with two counts of obstruction of justice in the U.S. District Court’s Eastern District of Louisiana Tuesday.
According to the charges, Mix deleted more than 200 text messages between himself and his supervisor when he was informed that lawyers would be collecting his electronic files in October 2010.
One of the texts deleted allegedly contains Mix’s estimate of the oil’s flow rate, about three times the official estimated rate that BP was giving at the time. Mix’s texts are alleged to contain information that show BP’s efforts were failing.
The charges also accuse Mix of a similar action in August 2011.
Some of the texts were recovered, which is why Mix now faces a criminal trial. If convicted, Mix could face 20 years in prison and fines up to $250,000 per count, according to the LA Times.