Oil spill legal battle costing feds millions

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The legal battle brewing in a New Orleans federal courtroom over the Gulf oil spill could cost BP and the other companies billions of dollars, but federal agencies are already spending millions of dollars just preparing for trial.

In a filing this week, Department of Justice lawyers outlined the efforts different federal agencies have made to provide documents to the parties in the civil suit, which includes BP, Anadarko and others.

“Since April 20, 2010 the United States has deployed massive resources to respond to the oil spill and its effects. It has also deployed massive resources to prepare for and respond to the discovery requests anticipated and served in this multi-district litigation,” the government says in the filing.

“As described below, in response to the discovery served by BP and the Anadarko Defendants the United States has spent millions of dollars to identify, search for, collect, review, and produce over seventeen million pages of documents.”

The Department of the Interior has spent $1.12 million so far acquiring software, equipment and outside help collecting documents to hand over to the litigants, and the department expects to spend another $1.18 million, according to the filing.

“DOI currently has approximately twenty contract staff engaged in document review, four federal staff primarily dedicated to management and collection for the discovery effort, and at any given time, is receiving significant support from an additional five to twenty federal staff,” the filing says.

The U.S. Coast Guard had to buy computer servers and software to handle between 10 and 20 terabytes of data related to its response to the spill, which has cost about $3 million so far. At times between 50 and 100 Coast Guard staff have been working on the document project for the litigation.

The USCG has digitized about 2,800 boxes of paper for the record and has about 1,900 boxes left, according to the filing.

The National Ocean & Atmospheric Administration has already spent about $4.6 million identifying, collecting and reviewing information for the discovery process.

“In all, NOAA collected twelve terabytes of data,” the filing says. “The use of the search terms followed by de-duplication yielded 6,400,000 documents, representing 15,300,000 pages loaded to the review platform thus far.”

The Environmental Protection Agency has spent about $570,000 on about 55 workers to review the documents as well as using 20 additonal EPA staff on the discovery efforts.

The U.S. Navy has spent about $168,296 on its part of the document discovery, while the Department of Energy’s costs — which will likely be significant given how much Secretary of Energy Steven Chu was involved — aren’t spelled out.

The trial, which is scheduled to begin February 27, 2012, will be in three phases.

The first phase will look at the blowout incident itself to examine the role of the various defendants. The other phases will include examining the efforts to control and shut down the well and how much oil was actually lost, and the third will deal with other liability issues, such as efforts to capture and disperse the oil.

The summary of the government’s filing is below.
2011 Sept Feds Spending on Spill Discovery