BP engineer's testimony contradicted by e-mail released by congressional investigators

[kpete]

Source: NOLA

BP engineer's testimony contradicted by e-mail released by congressional investigators
Published: Tuesday, June 15, 2010, 10:30 PM Updated: Wednesday, June 16, 2010, 8:36 AM
David Hammer, The Times-Picayune David Hammer, The Times-Picayune


Last month, Mark Hafle, BP's senior drilling engineer for the oil well that's now spewing millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, testified in Kenner that he and his team believed they had worked in concert with a contractor to come up with the safest possible design for encasing the well with cement and steel tubing so that "all the concerns had been addressed."

But now, e-mail messages released by congressional investigators paint a different picture of Hafle's confidence in the troubled well.

They show Hafle expressed concerns in the week before the April 20 disaster on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, calling the Macondo well 5,000 feet below that rig "a crazy well."

And contrary to Hafle's testimony that his team worked with the cementing contractor, Halliburton, to analyze models and design a plan "to give us the best chance to have a successful cement job," the internal e-mail messages now show that BP actually rejected a safer plan that required installing more components because, as well team leader John Guide wrote on April 16, "it will take 10 hours to install them."



Read more: http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/06/bp_engineers_testimony_contrad.html