Sunlight illuminates the lingering oil slick off the Mississippi Delta on May 24, 2010.WIKIMEDIA, NASA/GSFC, MODIS RAPID RESPONSEIn a liability trial for the 2010 oil spill that killed 11 men and released some 4 million barrels of oil the Gulf of Mexico, a senior BP executive Lamar McKay argues that his company was not the only guilty party in the disaster; Transocean, which owned and operated ran the Deepwater Horizon rig, and contractor Halliburton, which provided the cement used to seal the Macondo well, are also partly responsible.
“I think that's a shared responsibility, to manage the safety and the risk,”' McKay told the court, according to BBC News. “Sometimes contractors manage that risk. Sometimes we do. Most of the time it’s a team effort.”
Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former BP safety expert, testified on the US Department of Justice and the affected US states, the trial plaintiffs, stating that BP was directly responsible; that the spill was a result of the company’s poor management and heavy cost-cutting. “It's a classic failure of management and leadership in BP,” he testified.
BP paid $4.5 billion in 2012 to settle criminal charges and $7.8 billion to affected families and businesses, and now faces additional fines—up to ...
