On March 2, 2006, West was at his desk when he received a phone call.
"It was one of the employees I spoke to months earlier," West said. "He said 'just as we predicted, there's a leak at the caribou crossing we told you about and it's pretty bad.'"
Even worse, the leak had gone undetected for nearly a week. The leak detection equipment employees had warned BP managers about malfunctioned and for about five days oil spilled out of a hole in the pipeline the size of a pencil eraser. The leak was discovered when an oilfield worker surveying the area smelled petroleum in the air and stepped out of his car to investigate.
"He ended up with a black foot," West said. "That's how bad the spill was."
The oil leak was determined to be caused by "severe corrosion." It forced BP to shut down five oil processing centers in the region for about two weeks, which led to a spike in gas prices during a time of tight crude supplies.
Longtime BP employee Marc Kovac said a couple of weeks after the oil spill that he and his co-workers warned the company numerous times that their aggressive cost-cutting measures would increase the likelihood of accidents, pipeline ruptures and spills.
"For years we've been warning the company about cutting back on maintenance," Kovac told The New York Times. "We know that this [March 2006 oil spill] could have been prevented."
West said he immediately dispatched one of his investigators to the North Slope and he admits that he became "excited about the prospect of putting people in jail for environmental crimes" and that was his goal as he and his team, working with the FBI, the DOJ and Alaska state environmental and regulatory officials, launched their probe into the circumstances behind the spill.
As West's investigation into the company began to take shape, he obtained information that "very senior people in [BP's] London [headquarters] were aware of what was going on [with regard to the corrosion in the pipeline] and did nothing."
"That's where my investigation was going," he said. "This was one of the top two cases being investigated by the EPA's criminal division in 2007. This was a big deal. This case had all the markings of letting us getting high and deep into the corporate veil. "
West would not identify the executives, but two DOJ officials, who work in the agency's environmental and natural resources division and are familiar with the case, said it was Browne, BP's then-president and chief executive, and Tony Hayward, who was head of the company's production and exploration division. The DOJ officials would only speak on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive issues surrounding BP in the aftermath of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that led to the massive oil spill in the Gulf.
Hayward took over for Browne in May 2007, a move that BP accelerated by 18 months in the wake of the Alaska oil spill and widespread safety issues there at a March 2005 refinery explosion in Texas that killed 15 employees.
Grand Jury Convened
One of the setbacks West faced early on, however, was that he could not use the information he and his investigators obtained from the employees who claimed BP officials knew about the pipeline corrosion prior to the spill.
"One of the things that made this case slow was the vindictive nature of BP," West said. "Sources we spoke with would not allow their name to be used because they feared they would be fired or retaliated against. What that meant was that I couldn't send investigators out to knock on their doors at night and take their statements. [The employees] said 'what you have to do is get me in front of a grand jury and subpoena me to testify.'"
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