Cost cutting Vs Process Safety

An excellent article in the Wall Street Journal mentions the following in the aftermath of the BP oil spill:
'Early on June 5, 2008, a piece of steel tubing ruptured on BP PLC's vast Atlantis oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The tubing was attached to a defective pipeline pump that BP had put off repairing, in what an internal report later described as "the context of a tight cost budget."
The rupture caused a minor spill, just 193 barrels of oil, but BP investigators identified bigger concerns.
They found the deferred repair was a "critical factor" in the incident, but "leadership did not clearly question" the safety impact of the delay. The budget for Atlantis—one of BP's most sophisticated facilities— was "underestimated," resulting in "conflicting directions/demands."
Until the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf, Mr. Hayward repeatedly said he was slaying two dragons at once: safety lapses that led to major accidents, including a deadly 2005 Texas refinery explosion; and bloated costs that left BP lagging rivals Royal Dutch Shell PLC and Exxon Mobil Corp.
An internal BP presentation from December 2007, early in Mr. Hayward's tenure, noted that there had been 10 "high potential" incidents at BP facilities in the Gulf since the start of that year, including one December case in which a worker suffered an electric shock but survived. A common theme, the report found, was a failure to follow BP's own procedures and an unwillingness to stop work when something was wrong.
"As we enter the last two weeks of 2007, we are experiencing an unprecedented frequency of serious incidents in our operations," Richard Morrison, vice president for Gulf of Mexico production, wrote in an email to staff. "We are extremely fortunate that one or more of our co-workers has not been seriously injured or killed."
Read the full article in this link