Jury selection began on Monday for the trial of the most senior BP executive charged in connection with 2010’s fatal Deepwater Horizon oil disaster.
David Rainey, BP’s former vice president for exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, will stand trial in New Orleans, charged with obstructing a congressional investigation in the weeks after the oil spill, the largest in US history.
Prosecutors allege he deliberately withheld information about how much oil was being pumped into the Gulf following the explosion at the BP well.
Rainey is the most senior of a handful of individuals facing charges over the Deepwater disaster, which claimed 11 lives. Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine, BP’s top two supervisors on the rig, face involuntary manslaughter and other charges. BP engineer Kurt Mix still faces accusations that he deleted texts about the amount of oil flowing from the blown-out well. Mix’s first trial ended in mistrial.
Rainey was the second in command at BP’s “unified command center” in Robert, Louisiana, where cleanup and response efforts were coordinated.
A geologist by training, Rainey had no experience determining flow rates. According to the Justice Department, he “surfed the internet for information about how to conduct oil-spill-volume estimates”. Despite this lack of expertise, Rainey became a central figure in informing US authorities about the size of the spill and submitted a lengthy memo to the House subcommittee investigating the spill.
Initially BP estimated 1,000 barrels of oil a day were spilling out of the well. But many onlookers – including experts assessing BP’s “spill cam” – cast doubt on the oil company’s figures. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) early estimates put the number at closer to 5,000 barrels a day but qualified the estimate as “highly unreliable”.
When BP adjusted its calculation to mirror NOAA’s estimate, prosecutors allege Rainey “reverse engineered” the numbers to arrive at the new estimate. US authorities allege Rainey was aware that BP had numerous expert teams assessing the spill and that their internal estimates were far higher than the ones disclosed to the subcommittee. In one case, US authorities allege Rainey was given a presentation that put the estimated spill at 14,000 to 82,000 barrels per day.
The trial, expected to last three weeks, will focus on what Rainey knew about the oil’s flow and whether he provided misleading information in a subcommittee debriefing and in a 2011 interview with federal investigators.
