There is an account of a sworn statement provided by Michael Williams, a Transocean employee who was chief electronics technician on the rig, in the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal. In the account, Mr. Williams describes "confusion" among BP, Transocean and Halliburton in the final hours before the explosion.

Williams describes a meeting in which Transocean's rig manager mentioned plans he had received from BP which called for removing the drilling mud and running a pressure test to discover whether gas was leaking. BP's top employee on the rig disagreed with the rig manager's description of the BP plan, which caused another Transocean employee to intervene between the two men.

What can we take away from this? Standard operating procedures are developed and should be followed to prevent and avoid conflict and confusion. Whether there were SOPs to cover the events of the last several hours; and if so, whether they were followed will be a big, big deal in the reconstruction of this explosion.

Ready, fire, aim can be a formula for disaster. It seems this may be one of many reasons why the explosion occurred.