"BP Engineer's Testimony Contradicted by E-Mail"

"Last month, Mark Hafle, BP's senior drilling engineer for the oil well that's now spewing millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, testified in Kenner that he and his team believed they had worked in concert with a contractor to come up with the safest possible design for encasing the well with cement and steel tubing so that 'all the concerns had been addressed.'

But now, e-mail messages released by congressional investigators paint a different picture of Hafle's confidence in the troubled well.

They show Hafle expressed concerns in the week before the April 20 disaster on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, calling the Macondo well 5,000 feet below that rig 'a crazy well.'"

David Hammer reports for the New Orleans Times-Picayune June 15, 2010.