UPDATE: BP's Dudley Pledges Sweeping Safety Improvements

(Updates with Dudley quotes, reaction from US lawmaker) WASHINGTON (AFP)--Bob Dudley, BP Plc's (BP) chief executive officer-designate, vowed Tuesday to "change the culture" of how the company tackles safety issues following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster. Dudley, until now in charge of BP's Gulf clean-up operations, will become the group's first U.S. chief executive on Oct. 1, following the resignation Tuesday of the embattled Tony Hayward. "Sometimes events like this shake you to the core, the foundation, and you have two responses," Dudley said in an TV interview with ABC News. "One is to run away and hide, the other is to respond and really change the culture of the company and make sure all the checks and balances are there, just to make sure this does not happen again," said Dudley. Dudley said his top priority was to permanently seal the Gulf well, contain the crude spill and to clean up and restore the area's beaches. The Gulf spill is "going to clearly continue to change the rate of accelerations that we have on safe and reliable operations," said Dudley. "What's first on my agenda is to make sure we do seal that well, that the effort contains the spill. We clean up the beaches. We restore the Gulf. And we'll be doing that for a long time and that is my number one focus, particularly over the next month and a half," he said. Dudley praised Hayward -- whose PR gaffes handling the oil spill made him a target of U.S. fury -- for laying "the foundations for a strong focus on safe and reliable operations" at BP. U.S. Congressman Bart Stupak, one of the leading congressional investigators into the Gulf spill, said he worried that Dudley was not a true reformer, and that BP board members were "playing a high stakes game of musical chairs and simply rotating top leadership into different high-level posts." Dudley "must quickly prove that BP is serious about running safe operations whether in the Gulf Coast, on the North Slope or anywhere else in the United States," Stupak said in a statement. "No longer can record-setting profits come at the expense of forgoing infrastructure maintenance, ignoring industry recommended best practices or the lives and wellbeing of its workers." (END) Dow Jones Newswires July 27, 2010 08:34 ET (12:34 GMT)