As the BP trial enters the second day, the first witness called was Robert Bea, a University of California-Berkeley professor who was consulted by the White House commission that investigated the Deepwater Horizon explosion and blowout. He is a professor emeritus in civil and environmental engineering, is co-founder of the Center For Catastrophic Risk Management, and a former engineer at Shell Oil.
Bea was also a paid consultant for BP. He testified how he warned BP several times over the years to improve its safety procedures and culture, but those warnings - and even BP's own protocols - were subsequently ignored in the time leading up to the blowout.
