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Tyrone Benton

Tyrone Benton said the leak was not fixed at the time, but that the faulty device was shut down instead and a second one relied on.

Mr Feinberg ran the victims' claim fund set up in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

"We've got to get the claims out quicker," he told CNN. "We've got to get them out with more transparency so that claimants understand what the status is of their claim.

"And we've got to ease the burden on these folks in the Gulf. I was there last week. I'll be there tomorrow. We've got to accelerate the process just as the president instructed me to do."

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BP

The blowout preventer has giant shears designed to cut and seal off the well's main pipe.

The control pods are effectively the brains of the blowout preventer and contain both electronics and hydraulics.

This is where Mr Benton said the problem had been found.

"We saw a leak on the pod, so by seeing the leak we informed the company men," Mr Benton said of the earlier problem he had identified.

"They have a control room where they could turn off that pod and turn on the other one, so that they don't have to stop production."

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Mr Benton said his supervisor e-mailed both BP and Transocean, the owner of the rig, about the leaks when they were discovered.

He said he did not know whether the leaking pod had been turned back on before the disaster or not.

He said to repair the control pod would have meant temporarily stopping drilling work on the rig at a time when it was costing BP $500,000 (£337,000) a day to operate the Deepwater Horizon rig.

Henry Waxman, a House of Representatives Democrat who is overseeing congressional investigations into the rig disaster, has accused BP of taking safety shortcuts to save money.

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