Latest Mississippi River Delta News: March 5, 2013

Make BP pay to restore Gulf
By David Yarnold, CEO, National Audubon Society, for CNN. March 5, 2013.
“(CNN) — BP showed up in court last week, finally, nearly three years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the hell it unleashed on the Gulf Coast. It’s a huge, high-stakes trial, and BP is taking the beating it’s earned. Here’s what’s at stake for America if there is a judgment: potentially tens of billions of dollars that will be used to create jobs while restoring some of our most productive and vulnerable natural places…” (Read more)

BP put on trial 3 years later
Melissa Harris-Perry, MSNBC. March 3, 2013.
Video segments here.

BP Macondo well drilled in fragile rock formation prone to earthquakes, geoscientist testifies
By Mark Schleifstein, The Times-Picayune (New Orleans). March 4, 2013.
“BP’s Macondo oil and gas well was drilled in an area of the deepwater Gulf of Mexico that was prone to shallow earthquakes and whose rock formations were the fragile remains of a landslide of rubble that occurred after the end of the last Ice Age, a Scottish geoscience professor testified Monday…” (Read more)

Mark Bly, BP Executive, Defends Report On Gulf Oil Spill During Testimony
By Michael Kunzelman, The Associated Press. March 4, 2013.
“NEW ORLEANS — The BP executive who led the company’s probe of the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion denied Monday that his investigators narrowly focused on rig workers’ actions to spare onshore engineers and managers from blame for the disaster…” (Read more)