At the end of Tuesday’s Deepwater Horizon disaster hearings on July 20, lawyers for all four witnesses who had been scheduled to testify Wednesday notified the board that those witnesses were declining to appear. The witnesses, from Transocean, were scheduled to discuss the blowout preventer. They were issued subpoenas, but the board could not compel them to appear because they did not reside within the geographic jurisdiction of the investigation, the board said in a statement. Read more