An employee of the firm that owned the Deepwater Horizon rig has told a trial he was surprised when his team’s design to stop the blown out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico was scrapped by BP.
Transocean manager Robert Turlak, said the British oil giant had not said why the design his team had come up with was not used.
“We were so close,” he told a New Orleans court today. “We had come a long way.”
He was giving evidence at day two of the second phase in the trial over the 2010 Macondo disaster, which killed 11 people and saw millions of barrels worth of oil flood into the Gulf.
Lawyers for the palintiffs in the case – which include the US Government, individuals and companies hit by the spill and the states affected – argued that BP could have sealed the blown-out well much sooner had it Turlak’s capping system.
The Transocean team’s plan had been ready by early June, a month and a half after the disaster, but it would not be until July 15 when BP employed a capping stack to stop the oil.
Meanwhile BP has been ordered to pay out $111million to the claims administrator handling the compensation from the Macondo disaster.
The company had been looking for more than $25million in cuts for the budget of Patrick Juneau, who was appointed by the US courts to oversee payouts from the compensation fund.
But last night US Magistrate Judge Sally Shushan told BP to pay the $111million required for the claims administrator’s budget, giving them four working days to provide the money.
Last month the company’s objections to paying $130million for Juneau’s third quarter budget were overruled by Judge Carl Barbier, who is currently hearing the second phase of the trial over the Gulf of Mexico spill.
Judge Shushan has given BP until Friday lunchtime to appeal her ruling.