Apportioning blame

Right down the percentage.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - A federal judge has ruled that BP's reckless conduct resulted in the nation's worst offshore oil spill, leaving the company open to billions of dollars in penalties.

U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier's ruling Thursday could nearly quadruple the amount of civil penalties for polluting the Gulf of Mexico with oil from BP's Macondo well in 2010.

Barbier presided over a trial in 2013 to apportion blame for the spill that spewed oil from April 20 to mid-July 2010. Eleven men died when the well blew wild; BP already has agreed to billions of dollars in criminal fines.

Barbier says BP bears 67 percent of the blame for the spill. He says drilling rig owner Transocean Ltd. takes 30 percent of the blame, and cement contractor Halliburton Energy Service takes 3 percent.

So if we had to put a number on "gross negligence" would 67 percent meet the threshold?

Update:  More from the Advocate:

Under the Clean Water Act, a polluter can be forced to pay a maximum of either $1,100 or $4,300 per barrel of spilled oil. The higher limit applies if the company is found grossly negligent — as BP was in Barbier’s ruling. But penalties can be assessed at amounts lower than those caps.

Government experts estimated that 4.2 million barrels, or 176 million gallons, spilled into the Gulf. BP urged Barbier to use an estimate of 2.45 million barrels, or nearly 103 million gallons, in calculating any Clean Water Act penalties. Both sides agreed that 810,000 barrels, or 34 million gallons, of oil escaped the well but were captured before it could pollute the Gulf.

So this is a good start.  Things will continue to be complicated.  Now comes the matter of assessing specific dollar amounts.  Then the five Gulf states affected by the spill will split that take.  Louisiana has already dedicated its share to funding its crucial coastal restoration plan.  Whatever we get will be significantly less than we need. But it will be better than it could have been without this ruling.  

Something, anyway

Good to see they got at least one guilty plea out of Halliburton.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - A federal judge accepted a plea agreement Thursday that calls for Halliburton Energy Services to pay a $200,000 fine for destroying evidence after BP's 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Halliburton pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge stemming from the deletion of data during a post-spill review of the cement job on BP's blown-out Macondo well.

The Houston-based company could have withdrawn its guilty plea if U.S. District Judge Jane Triche Milazzo had rejected its deal with the Justice Department.

Milazzo said she believes the plea agreement is reasonable and agreed with prosecutors and the company that it "adequately reflects the seriousness of the offense."

Halliburton also agreed to make a $55 million contribution to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, but that payment was not a condition of the deal.

The company was BP PLC's cement contractor on the drilling rig that exploded in the Gulf in April 2010, killing 11 workers.

Not that this amounts to much. 

Hey lookie lookie

Halliburton "finds" some additional evidence relevant to the BP trial just laying under the couch cushions or something.

On Tuesday, BP provided its own response, detailing Halliburton's repeated refusal to give the company's investigators samples of the cement, and outlining the repeated delays that resulted in the federal sample testing being done 16 months after the accident.

Godwin said Thursday that the additional material was found Wednesday at a Halliburton facility in Lafayette.

Godwin said the company "properly turned over" other samples from the Macondo cement blend in responding to a subpoena early in the investigation. He said the additional samples were "kept in the lab, up on shelves, segregated from everything else, they have not been touched. They have been sitting there."

Nothing weird about that.