BP Plc's global management team knew of safety concerns at the company's Texas City, Texas, oil refinery before a deadly explosion last year, U.S. safety investigators said. Flammable vapors were discharged in eight instances between 1994 and 2004 from the same tank that caused the March 2005 explosion, the Chemical Safety Board said in a report... [The] board's chairman, Carolyn Merritt, said today...[that before] the blast, BP safety efforts were mostly focused on ``improving procedural compliance and reducing occupational injury rates, while catastrophic safety risks remained''... The blast was the worst U.S. industrial accident in more than a decade, killing 15 and injuring 180... Ronnie Chappell, a BP spokesman, said many of the findings the board published today were included in a company report last December, and that budget cutbacks criticized by the regulator were not responsible for the blast... The investigators said maintenance declined throughout the 1990s when Amoco Corp. owned the refinery, and fell further after BP bought Amoco.