Alaska Employment Law

Text lays out insufficient funding and negligent monitoring 

BP Exploration (Alaska), Inc. has agreed to plead guilty to one count of violating the Clean Water Act with regard to a 200,000-gallon spill on the State land on the East side of Prudhoe Bay in March of 2006. 

The text of the 30-page Plea Agreement is here, here, and here.  Here is the State letter accepting the Agreement.

In the Plea document, BPXA agrees that it “did not expend sufficient resources to address the complex issues of corrosion control” in the gathering lines.  It also agrees that it failed to “run cleaning pigs through the [gathering lines] to ensure the integrity of the leak detection system as well as to prevent internal corrosion.”  

An examination of a section of the corroded pipe from the March 2006 spill found ”[a]pproximately six inches of sediment and residual oil  . . . on the bottom of the thirty-four-inch-diameter pipe.”

U. S. v. BP Exploration (Alaska), Inc., Case No. 3:07-cr-00125 TMB (D. Alaska Oct. 25, 2007).

Nelson Cohen from theAnchorage U S Attorney’s Office represents the government.  Jeff Feldman of Feldman Orlansky & Sanders is local counsel for BPXA.