There were certainly some very questionable happenings in that Blow Out.
The one that stands out to me is displacing the mud with sea water,.... And there were a lot of BP Executives visiting the well...very little has been said about them....
What stands out for me was the sheer number of corners cut, from reviews to inspections, to procedures, to materials...
It strikes me that there were too many checks and balances in place for them all to have been ignored without the application of external forces, piling straw on the camel so to speak. This is especially true when it involves a potentially huge find with top-of-the-line equipment and personnel in a demanding environment. Nobody with a brain cuts corners in a situation like that and nobody without a brain gets to run a job like that. Yet in this case, it was definitely a massive group effort. How does that happen unless external forces were applied?
I have worked in the chemical processing industry. I can tell you that I have undergone such management pressures. Yet when I, as a lowly project engineer, whipped out a piece of paper and demanded a review, I got one, thus over-ruling a division VP in a Fortune 200 company. It may have cost me a promotion, but it did not cost me my job. In fact, not only did we succeed, but we were able to do truly innovative things with minimal review because we had transformed our relationships with the air quality people.
A drilling operation like this is far more bureaucratic. I just don't see how this kind of thing can happen without external forces applied, vigorously. Where I come from, people would quit their jobs before letting such things happen. At that point, the cat would be out of the bag. There would be memos, calls to reporters...