Feds make 1st arrest in BP spill case

HOUSTON — A former BP engineer deleted text messages about the amount of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico after the Macondo well blew out in 2010, the federal government alleged Tuesday in the first criminal case arising from the deadly spill.

Kurt Mix, 50, who lives in the Houston suburb of Katy, was arrested on a criminal complaint filed in New Orleans containing two charges of obstruction of justice.

He was freed on $100,000 bail after appearing Tuesday afternoon before U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith in Houston, who ordered Mix to stay in Texas or Louisiana and to appear in a federal court in New Orleans on May 3.

Mix is accused of deleting records relating to the amount of oil flowing from the Macondo well after the April 20, 2010, blowout and explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that killed 11 workers and led to a three-month spill that the government says poured nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The charges allege acts after the blowout, rather than ones by BP or its contractors leading up to the disaster, which also are the subjects of continuing civil and criminal investigations.

“The Deepwater Horizon Task Force is continuing its investigation into the explosion and will hold accountable those who violated the law in connection with the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a news release announcing the criminal charge.

Mix, a drilling and completions project engineer for BP, worked on a team trying to estimate the amount of crude flowing from the well and to stop it. Methods to stop the flow included a procedure called a “top kill,” an unsuccessful attempt to plug the leak by forcing material into the wellhead.

The charges against Mix allege that he deleted 200 text messages despite orders from the company to save them. Some of the messages included reports that the top kill was failing, the government says.

Joan McPhee, a partner at international law firm Ropes & Gray who is representing Mix, issued a statement calling the charges “startling government overreaching” and predicting that her client will be exonerated.

“The government says he intentionally deleted text messages from his phone, but the content of those messages still resides in thousands of emails, text messages and other documents that he saved,” McPhee said.

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BP criminal complaint

“Indeed, the emails that Kurt preserved include the very ones highlighted by the government.”

Texts the government alleges were deleted include one sent the evening of May 26, 2010, after the first day of the top kill attempt.

In that message, Mix reported that the well was flowing at the rate of more than 15,000 barrels a day, at a time when the company's public estimate was 5,000 barrels a day, according to the Justice Department news release. The release said BP engineers had concluded internally that the top kill would fail if the flow was greater than 15,000 barrels per day.

A former government prosecutor who has followed the BP litigation closely said the allegations against Mix raise questions about whether BP had internal information that more oil was fouling the Gulf than the company initially acknowledged, and about what might have motivated Mix's alleged deletions of text exchanges.

“If Mr. Mix was acting alone, BP may be able to avoid criminal charges for his behavior, but if other employees were also destroying evidence, it's likely that BP would face obstruction of justice charges,” said David Uhlmann, a University of Michigan law professor who formerly headed the Justice Department's Environmental Crimes Section.

BP said it would have no comment on the charges against Mix and that it is cooperating with official investigations into the disaster. “BP had clear policies requiring preservation of evidence in this case and has undertaken substantial and ongoing efforts to preserve evidence,” the company said in a statement.

Legal experts speculated that the charges might be the first step in a strategy by prosecutors to begin with lower-level employees as they seek to strengthen their case against higher-level decision makers.

“It seems to me the government has started with what appears to be a very provable case,” said Chick Foret, a former federal and state prosecutor. “Often it will take the layup as its first shot.”

emily.pickrell@chron.com