During more than a dozen interviews last week, BP officials and spokespeople for a number of government agencies working on the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill response denied knowledge of oil in the bay.

Even as they spoke, however, Escambia County officials and local fishermen were reporting finding weathered oil, as they've been doing for weeks. BP's own crews were hand-scooping it up, and a submerged-oil team from BP's Deepwater Horizon Response Incident Command Post in Mobile was investigating.

"BP says it's all gone, but it's not. I've known it was out there for a month," said a commercial fisherman who asked not to be identified because he is working for BP in the cleanup and feared losing his job. [my emphasis]

The panel investigating the April 20 Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 workers and started the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, portrayed the oil giant as ignoring past mistakes and not effectively emphasizing safety.

"If you don't change the safety culture for the entire company, you're going to have incidents," lead investigator Hung Nguyen told a BP executive Thursday at a joint U.S. Coast Guard-Interior Department hearing in Houston.

"We're concerned about BP's supervision, their expertise and their control on the rig," investigator Jason Mathews said.

Nguyen, a U.S. Coast Guard captain, admonished BP senior officials for failing to offer a satisfactory explanation of who was responsible for ensuring safety for BP's deepwater operations.