BP Official Quit Over Safety Months Before Spill

An engineer who had been recruited to join BP in 2007 to improve its drilling policies and protocols resigned over safety disagreements a few months before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, according to a lawsuit related to the spill. Kevin Lacy, BP's senior vice president for drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico, resigned in December 2009 over concerns that BP was not committed to improving safety, the AP reports. The rig blew up the following April 20.

Lacy's departure "coincided with other additional and extensive reshuffling of personnel in the BP Gulf of Mexico drilling unit," according to documents filed last night. By the time the rig exploded, four of the five senior officials in BP's Gulf of Mexico region had only been on the job a few months, the lawsuit attests. The claims are part of a lawsuit filed last year, but since amended, that claims BP hid information and made misleading or untrue statements about its safety practices in an effort to inflate its stock price before the oil spill.
(More BP oil spill stories.)