Reports Show BP Opposed New Safety Rules - WSJ.com

Reports Show BP Opposed New Safety Rules - WSJ.com

As BP touted the scale of the cleanup, documents showed that it was one of several companies that opposed efforts to tighten up safety procedures offshore. Last year, the MMS studied more than 1,400 offshore incidents that led to 41 deaths and hundreds of injuries between 2001 and 2007. Many of them, the MMS found, were linked to factors such as communications failures, a lack of written procedures and the failure of supervisors to enforce existing rules, and proposed mandatory requirements to reduce the number of incidents. That would have replaced a system under which many safety procedures were voluntary.