More details continue to emerge on the safety flaws and lax oversight that preceded the spill. The Wall Street Journal reports BP used a well design that congressional investigators have deemed “risky” at the site of the explosion. Overall, BP has used the less costly design, known as “long string,” on 35 percent of its deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico. The more expensive design has additional safeguards for containing breaches. A Deepwater Horizon rig worker meanwhile has told the BBC he reported finding a leak in the oil rig’s safety equipment in the weeks before the explosion. The worker, Tyrone Benton, says BP didn’t fix the blowout preventer, instead shutting it down and using a second piece of equipment. Repairing the blowout preventer would have entailed temporarily suspending the oil drilling while the equipment was fixed. And the New York Times reports the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency responsible for regulating offshore drilling, repeatedly failed to implement advice from its own experts to minimize the risk of failure in the well’s last-ditch safeguard, the blind shear ram. Had the ram been effective, it could have sliced through the drill pipe to seal the well after the explosion.