Criminal Charges Filed Against BP Engineer

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

April 24, 2012 | 2:34 PM

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The Coast Guard tries to put out a fire during the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill

NPR broke news today of the first criminal charges filed in the 2009 Gulf Oil Spill:

“The first criminal charges in connection with the BP oil spill have been filed against a former BP engineer named Kurt Mix,” NPR’s Carrie Johnson reports exclusively.
Carrie just told our Newscast unit that Mix has been charged with obstruction of justice for allegedly deleting text messages after the spill. The texts were related to the amount of oil gushing into the Gulf. Mix will make his first appearence in court today.
Carrie adds that there has been an expectation that criminal charges would be brought against individuals, but this is the first person charged since the spill happened two years ago.
These are preliminary charges and a law enforcement official says there are more charges to come, Carrie reports.

Want to read more about the aftermath of the spill? Check out StateImpact Texas’s ongoing coverage of the disaster’s ongoing economic and environmental impact.
Marketplace also aired an interesting report last week on what happened to all that spilled oil.