Reply #36: Fmr. EPA Investigator Scott West: ''BP Told 'It Can Do Whatever It Wants, Won’t Be Held Accountable'

[Octafish]

Like Jeanne Pascal, this guy has a lot of important stuff to add to the conversation:

Fmr. EPA Investigator Scott West: US Has Told BP "It Can Do Whatever It Wants and Won’t Be Held Accountable"

One month after the BP oil spill, we speak to Scott West, a former top investigator at the Environmental Protection Agency who led an investigation of BP following a major oil pipeline leak in Alaska’s North Slope that spilled 250,000 gallons of oil on the Alaskan tundra. Before West finished his investigation, the Bush Justice Department reached a settlement with BP, and the oil company agreed to pay $20 million. At the same time, BP managed to avoid prosecution for the Texas City refinery explosion that killed fifteen workers by paying a $50 million settlement.

DemocracyNow.org
May 20, 2010

EXCERPT...

SCOTT WEST: Yes, good morning, Amy.

In August of 2005, I was introduced to Chuck Hamel, who spoke to me about employees and workers on the North Slope providing information that the transit lines were full of sludge and were likely to suffer catastrophic failure due to corrosion and that then there would be a tremendous loss of oil onto the slope. Chuck made these employees available to me, and I was able to get this information beforehand. I wanted to get in front of that upcoming spill and prevent the spill from occurring, but I found that the EPA and the federal government really had no controls over the operation of that pipeline. So we were in a wait pattern.

Finally, in March of '06, I got a phone call from the slope from one of these workers that I had spoken with telling me that indeed the anticipated rupture had occurred and that a tremendous amount of oil was out onto the frozen tundra. We were lucky that it was wintertime, because the lake that it got into was frozen solid and it made the cleanup a lot easier. Had it been summertime, there would have been a tremendous sheen of oil flowing into the Beaufort Sea. But anyway, knowing that these workers had information that the pipeline would rupture and had provided that to their management and senior management and nothing had been done, that made that a criminal negligence, at the very least. And so I dispatched criminal investigators from EPA CID and sent them to the North Slope to begin a criminal investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: And what happened?

SCOTT WEST: Well, as we dug into it, we realized that we had a very large issue going on and that information that we were preliminarily receiving indicated that high-level management within BP, not only in the United States, but across the ocean and into London, were aware of the policies on the North Slope to forgo maintenance in exchange for saving money and that there was awareness at very high levels that this particular transit line was in jeopardy. And so, that made the investigation become very complex and generated a lot of interest within the EPA and the Department of Justice of being able to get into very senior levels of the corporation and hold them accountable for their decisions, which led to the corrosion rupturing the pipeline.

As we built up our investigation, it became very difficult. BP is known by its workers to be extremely retaliatory. And these workers did not want to lose their jobs or be blacklisted from other work in the oil industry, and so they were reticent about speaking with the investigators directly, which caused us to have to impanel a grand jury and issue subpoenas for these individuals to testify. So, once ordered by the court to come in and testify, they were protected from retaliation. So they would come in. We would interview them through the unwieldy process of using the grand jury, which slowed the investigation down, but also netted us a significant amount of information. In addition, we issued subpoenas for documents. And then in the response to those documents, we were buried. We received the equivalent of about 62 million pages of documents that were going to require a great deal of time to sift through and develop the leads and the information from that information.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Scott—

SCOTT WEST: So, by—yes, yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Scott West, in this particular situation, you had the perhaps unusual situation—or how unusual is it to have so many workers basically providing inside information on what was going on and the problems involved, but yet at the same time, as you say, they were afraid to publicly come forward because of possible retaliation? How frequently does that happen in these kinds of situations, especially with oil companies?

SCOTT WEST: Well, it's pretty common in the—in industry. Workers do not want to lose their livelihoods, and so they’re reluctant to discuss openly about what’s going on in their companies. I found, through my career as an environmental investigator, that it was often easier to get witnesses to give up information on friends, co-workers and spouses before they would give it up on their employer. But ultimately, most people come around and do the right thing and provide the information that they have about criminal activity. In this particular instance, though, the vindictiveness of BP, as understood by the employees and conveyed to the investigators, was extreme. And so, it made it much more difficult.

But in terms of where my investigation was going, by June of '07, we had several investigators working on the case. We had several prosecutors from the Department of Justice, both from the US attorney's office in Alaska and from the Environmental Crimes Section at main Justice. A tremendous amount of man hours were being devoted to this case. And, in fact, the director of CID had told about that time that the investigation that we had in Alaska was one of the top two criminal cases that EPA had at the time. So there was a lot of momentum, a lot of interest in this case.

But by August of '07, something had shifted dramatically, and we were told by the US attorney's office in Alaska that the case would settle out for corporate misdemeanor. And at the meeting that I attended there in late August, the question was asked, if we had to go to trial today, what could we prove? And I had to admit that a trial at that moment, the most we could prove was a corporate misdemeanor. And then I said, "But we’re not done with our investigation. We’ve only just begun. We need another couple of years to really vet this out." And they said, well, can I guarantee that I would be able to convict individuals. And I said, "Of course not. You can’t guarantee anything like that in the criminal investigative arena." And so, with that, they said, "Well, then we’re done." And I was in shock. It’s unheard of for a special agent in charge to be denied the opportunity to complete an investigation that was so far from nearing its end. And then—

CONTINUED...

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/20/fmr_epa_investiga...

"Beyond Prosecution" has me, too, "Beyond Pronounciation," tango-tee. That's why the printed word is so important: When anger prevents me from sharing my thoughts on a subject, an article may do the talking. So, I very much appreciate your words, my Friend.