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BP Chairman Lamar McKay, center, and Dave Nagel, right, executive and vice president of BP America, arrive to testify before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce committee hearing on the Deepwater Horizon rig oil spill.

Managers at oil giant BP PLC decided to forge ahead in finishing work on the doomed Deepwater Horizon rig despite some tests suggesting that highly combustible gas had seeped into the well, according to testimony released by congressional investigators and documents seen by The Wall Street Journal.

The move to start withdrawing heavy drilling fluid that prevents gas from escaping the well, despite some worrisome tests and before a final cement plug could be placed in the well, raises questions about the judgments made on the rig in the hours before an explosion erupted into the night air of April 20, killing 11 and eventually leaving oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico.

Oil leaks into the Gulf of Mexico from the damaged pipe of the Deepwater Horizon rig on the sea floor, shown in a photo taken from a video by BP on Tuesday.

Accounts from two contractors say drilling "mud" was withdrawn before placement of a final cement plug, which would have been one more safeguard against natural gas surging from the well. Once mud came out, the last safeguard, a giant set of valves called a blowout preventer, didn't do its job, possibly because of a defect such as leaking hydraulics or because it was jammed by debris from the well, documents produced by congressional investigators show. The rig was soon engulfed in flames.

A senior BP executive and the chief executive of rig owner Transocean Ltd. told lawmakers Wednesday that discrepancies in key pressure tests on the afternoon of the explosion should have raised alarms.

They should "lead to a conclusion that there was something happening in the well bore that shouldn't be happening," Transocean CEO Steven Newman told the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

BP America Chairman Lamar McKay told the panel "that discrepancy is critical, and the investigation will have to tear that apart piece by piece."

Critical details remain unclear, including who made the decisions to push ahead with operations to secure the well despite signs of trouble, and whether federal regulators were consulted and signed off. It's also unclear how natural gas first made its way into the well, which was supposed to be sealed on the sides and bottom.

BP has said it concluded the rig had discovered a big oil field in an area it called Macondo. BP planned to move the rig leased from Transocean to start another exploration well.

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Meanwhile, BP engineers would devise a plan to eventually return and extract the crude. All that was left to do at the site was to seal the well, using a combination of cement, pipes and plugs.

The final phase of that process began about 8 p.m. April 19, when Halliburton Co. workers in red coveralls began to pour cement into the pipe, according to daily drilling reports reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Some 18,000 feet down, at the bottom of the pipe, the cement would make a U-turn and start filling in the space between the outside of the pipe and the rock. The cement was laced with nitrogen to help seal out gas, according to drilling records from the companies and testimony Wednesday from Halliburton executive Tim Probert.

Two hours later, workers started pumping in the heavy mud, according to company documents. This was supposed to push the cement down and out of the pipe, and it also would serve to keep anything from flowing upward.

By 12:35 a.m. on April 20, there was cement around the pipe. If all had gone well, the only pathway for oil, gas or fluids to move to the surface was through steel pipe. Right at the end, Halliburton poured a cement plug to seal the very bottom of the well, according to the documents.

Before the well could be called complete, several pressure tests had to be run. The first occurred the afternoon of April 20, and all indications were that the well and cement were working as expected, company records show. But while all this was going on, according to a memo from BP to congressional investigators, hydrocarbons were entering the well. Most likely, these were a combination of natural gas and condensate, a petroleum liquid.

At 5 p.m., workers ran another key test called a negative pressure test, used to determine if the well had been properly cemented, according to testimony given to the committee by BP executive James Dupree and cited by committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D., Calif.).

The pressure in the well was lowered to see if gas could enter. Test results were at best "inconclusive" and at worst "not satisfactory," Mr. Dupree, the BP Senior Vice President for the Gulf of Mexico, said, according Mr. Waxman. It appeared the cement job hadn't sealed off the well and a gaseous mixture was leaking into it, Mr. Waxman said Mr. Dupree said.

A second test was run. Mr. Dupree said its results could indicate that natural gas was building up inside the well, according to Mr. Waxman.

At 8 p.m., less than two hours before the blast, BP officials decided that additional tests "justified ending the test and proceeding," Mr. Waxman said, attributing this information to a communication from a BP lawyer. The congressman said information reviewed by his committee "describes an internal debate between Transocean and BP personnel about how to proceed."

One course would have been to try to shore up the cement. As the cement contractor, Halliburton could have shot a hole through the pipe and squeezed more cement in between the pipe and the rock. A new section of pipe would then have had to be installed to replace the pierced piece, industry officials explain.

Oil and gas stream from the riser of the Deepwater Horizon well May 11, 2010. Video courtesy United States Coast Guard.

This would have taken a week to 10 days, says one industry veteran. Between the cost of hiring the rig and the subcontractors, this maneuver could have cost BP $5 million to $10 million, according to industry estimates.

This extra work, however, wasn't pursued. Instead, BP forged ahead. A worker on the rig said the crews would usually set a final cement plug and then remove the remaining mud. He said BP called the federal Minerals Management Service to request clearance to take out the mud. BP's Mr. McKay said he wasn't aware of any such call.

Workers began to remove the mud. A log provided by investigators shows significant volumes of the heavy fluid coming out between 8:10 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.

But as workers took out the heavy mud and lighter seawater flowed in, gas began to rise. It still isn't clear if the gas came up the pipe or came up the outside of the pipe and then entered the pipe around the seafloor.

As gas flowed up 5,000 feet of pipe from the sea floor to the surface, it got warmer and expanded, pushing drilling mud and seawater ahead of it. The blowout had begun, setting off the fire that sank the Horizon.

— Jennifer Levitz contributed to this article.

Write to Russell Gold at russell.gold@wsj.com and Neil King Jr. at neil.king@wsj.com

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According to a congressional investigation, the Deepwater Horizon's blowout preventer had a dead battery, was leaking hydraulic fluid and in any case was too weak to shut down the well in certain circumstances.

In addition, even before the explosion and fire that sank the rig, industry experts—including one at BP—knew that blowout preventers are designed to work only in certain circumstances, and even then are susceptible to failure, according to interviews with The Wall Street Journal and reviews of industry literature.

"They're not failsafe," said Per Holand, a Norwegian engineer who was hired a decade ago by regulators in the U.S. to study blowout preventers' reliability. "There are some limitations."

In a second day of hearings held jointly by the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Minerals Management Service, a supervisor for the MMS testified that although the industry has standards for blowout preventers, he isn't aware that anyone in the U.S. government checks to see if those standards are met.

The blowout preventers used in deepwater drilling are complex devices meant to shut off a well in different ways. The last line of defense on the preventers is a set of so-called blind shear rams, which cut the pipe and then seal off the well. But multiple industry studies in recent years have called into question whether blind shear rams could cut through the thick, high-strength steel pipe used in deepwater drilling.

One 2007 paper presented at a Society of Petroleum Engineers conference in Bahrain that was co-written by a BP engineer said new drill pipe "has in some cases exceeded the capacity of some [blowout preventer] shear rams to successfully or reliably shear drill pipe." The BP engineer couldn't be reached. BP spokesman Andrew Gowers said that while stronger pipe is harder to cut, "that is taken into account in manufacturers' specifications."

In testimony before a congressional committee on Wednesday, Steven Newman, chief executive of Transocean Ltd., the Deepwater rig's owner, said the devices may not work in a catastrophic blowout, when pipes, cement, rocks and other debris may be shooting up through the well into the valves.

"A blowout preventer is not designed to close around significant debris," Mr. Newman said.

BP CEO Tony Hayward, in an interview after the rig sank, described the blowout preventer as a "failsafe piece of equipment that clearly has failed."

In Wednesday's hearings, Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich.) said investigators had identified problems with the Deepwater Horizon's blowout preventer that could have kept it from working.

First, the device had a leak in the hydraulics that control the valves. The leak, which was discovered by underwater robots after the blowout occurred, could have made the valves too weak to shut down the well.

Second, the investigation found, the Horizon's blowout preventer had been modified in 2005 to remove one set of valves and replace them with a "test ram," a valve that can't shut off the well but can be used to test whether the device is working. That would make testing easier and cheaper, but would remove one line of defense.

In Senate testimony on Tuesday, Mr. Newman, the Transocean CEO, said BP had ordered and paid for the modification. In congressional testimony Wednesday, BP's Mr. McKay said he didn't know what modifications had been made or whether BP had ordered them.

Third, it isn't clear whether the blowout preventer ever received signals from the rig that it should clamp down on the well. The main controls on the rig may have been destroyed in the initial explosion, congressional investigators found.

And the "deadman switch," a device meant to trigger the preventer if it loses communication with the rig, may not have worked because at least one of its two batteries was dead.

The MMS, the federal agency that regulates offshore drilling along with the Coast Guard, requires companies to provide proof that their shear rams are powerful enough to shut the well. But Michael Saucier, MMS's regional supervisor for field operations in the Gulf of Mexico, testified Wednesday that BP didn't submit such documents in its permit application for the well the rig was drilling, and the MMS didn't check. BP's Mr. McKay testified he wasn't aware of the MMS requirement.

Mr. Saucier also testified that his agency allows the oil companies themselves to install the blowout preventers on the rigs before the MMS inspects them.

Summing up Mr. Saucier's testimony on blowout preventers, Coast Guard Capt. Hung Nguyen, co-chairman of the panel, said: "Designed to industry standard, manufactured by the industry and installed by the industry, with no government witnessing or oversight of construction or installation, is that correct?"

"That would be correct," Mr. Saucier said.

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BP is still deciding whether first to attempt to lower the device, known as a top hat, onto the leak itself or to divert oil by inserting a tube into the broken pipe that once connected the well to the Deepwater Horizon rig, which caught fire on April 20 and sank two days later.

In both cases, oil would then be funneled up to a rig on the surface.

Deployment could begin late Thursday or on Friday, said Doug Suttles, chief operating officer of BP exploration and production, speaking at a news conference in Robert, La.

BP's attempt to cover the larger of two leaks with a much bigger device, known as a cofferdam, failed last week when ice-like crystals called natural-gas hydrates clogged the hole through which the oil was to be piped.

BP is struggling to reduce the flow of oil from the well, which has leaked an estimated 5,000 barrels a day into the Gulf for three weeks.

The spill has the potential to become the biggest ever in U.S. territory, surpassing the amount of oil released into Alaska's Prince William Sound by the Exxon Valdez tanker in 1989.

Most of the oil has remained offshore, though soft "tar balls" have washed ashore at the South Pass entry to the Mississippi River in Louisiana and on Alabama's Dauphin Island, according to Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry. Oil has washed ashore on Louisiana's Chandeleur Islands as well.

A total of 13,000 people are working on spill-recovery efforts. A large number of them are preparing for further landfall with clean-up and containment operations stretching from coastal Louisiana to St. Petersburg, Fla.

The work ranges from clearing beaches of debris so it doesn't become hazardous waste if oil washes onto it, to laying out containment boom to protect shoreline and inlets around the gulf.

More than 1.4 million feet of protective boom has been set up—the largest amount used for any U.S. oil spill. An additional 2.3 million feet is on order and "being delivered as we speak," Mr. Suttles said.

"The amount of boom that is out there is rather astronomical," Coast Guard Chief Warrant Officer Adam Wine said.

BP estimates the total cost of responding to the spill, including attempts to cap the deep-water well and compensate fisherman and others hurt economically, stands at $350 million.

Those fighting the spill have spread hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemicals that are supposed to break the oil into tiny particles that can then be digested by naturally occurring bacteria in the water.

The dispersant currently being applied in the largest quantity, Corexit 9500, is more toxic to certain organisms than some of the other dispersants approved for oil-spill use by the federal government, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency. One reason officials have chosen to use Corexit is that large quantities were available immediately, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said at a news conference Wednesday. She said tests are being conducted on the dispersants' effects on the environment.

Executives at Nalco Co., the firm that makes Corexit 9500, said the substance is far less toxic than oil.

Meanwhile, the White House said Wednesday it would ask Congress for $118 million to help people affected by the spill.

—Jared A. Favole, Martin Vaughan and Jeffrey Ball contributed to this article.

Alabama officials, for example, were able to bring in large ocean boom to protect Mobile Bay after smaller segments of boom anchored to wooden pilings failed to hold. National Guard troops have had time to fortify Alabama's Dauphin Island with sand berms and sand-filled barricades called Hesco barriers.

In Louisiana, Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal has asked the Coast Guard for permission to use the barriers and has overseen sandbag drops and the creation of tube-filled "tiger" dams to help protect marshes that serve as a breeding ground for shrimp, oysters and other life.

"There's no doubt that time has been a blessing," said Todd Stacy, spokesman for Republican Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama.

The disaster began to unfold when the Deepwater Horizon rig, leased by BP PLC, sank April 22 after an explosion and fire, leaving 11 workers dead. Efforts to stop the ocean-floor well beneath it from gushing crude oil into the Gulf have so far failed.

Oil was washing ashore Thursday at several spots on the Louisiana coast. On Elmer's Island, west of where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico, the beach was dotted with dime-size globules of oil the color and consistency of melted chocolate. Louisiana Army National Guard soldiers in dump trucks and bulldozers were racing to build sand berms.

Areas west of Elmer's Island were seeing still more oil coming ashore, said Wayne Keller, executive director of the Grand Isle Port Commission.

The bulk of the oil spill, which scientists estimate at nearly 100,000 barrels so far, has remained offshore. But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects that more oil could hit shore over the next two days at points along a broad arc of Louisiana coastline, including St. Bernard, Plaquemines and Terrebonne parishes.

The longer it stays there, the better, said Melanie Driscoll, a Louisiana conservation director for the National Audubon Society. She said oil loses volatile compounds that are harmful to birds and other wildlife as it stays in the water, and also becomes less likely to coat feathers of birds, which can then die.

Offshore, there is anecdotal evidence the spill might be killing marine life, such as the discovery over the past few days of six dead dolphins in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Necropsies are being conducted on the creatures to see if they died from effects of the spill.

"There hasn't been a huge influx of oil, so there's not too much to say at this point," said Tyler Joki, a marine science technician, second class, for the Coast Guard.

How slow things have been on shore could be seen Wednesday at the Louisiana State Animal Response Team center at historic Fort Jackson, near the tip of Louisiana. There, 28 staff members who had geared up to treat as many as 200 oiled birds at a time had received just eight since the spill. Two Northern Gannetts died, but six other birds quickly recovered after being scrubbed with Dawn dish soap, said Jay Holcomb, director of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, which is helping in the center.

As he spoke, a brown pelican floated alone in a tank designated for birds that have been cleaned of oil but need to get their strength back before being released back into the wild. State and federal wildlife officials have been particularly concerned about rare seabirds like the brown pelican, which was reintroduced into Louisiana about 15 years ago after having been eliminated from the state.

This particular pelican had dived into a sheen of oily water off the coast five days earlier as cleanup crews were trying to mop up, and, like many oiled water fowl, faced probable death from drowning or hypothermia.

"It's a pretty horrible way to go," said Mr. Holcomb, whose center has responded to some 200 major oil spills, including the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. There, he said, he and other workers treated about 1,600 oiled birds in the first six months after the spill.

With oil still spewing out of the BP well, things could still heat up along the Gulf Coast. After a helicopter tour with Mr. Jindal Wednesday, Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, said he was startled to see globs of tar-like oil washed up on South Pass, near the southernmost point of Louisiana. Just three days earlier, he said, the line of oil had been on the ocean side of a line of booms there.

That appears to indicate that the oil is becoming weighted down with water and gliding beneath the booms, he added.

"It's becoming an invisible monster," Mr. Nungesser said.

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While the world's biggest offshore driller may not succeed in limiting its financial liability, the filing could give Transocean an edge in what could be a lengthy, multipronged legal battle against claims for damages from the accident that killed 11 workers.

"One of the primary goals of this filing is to consolidate in a single court many of the lawsuits that have been filed...to initiate an orderly process for these lawsuits and claims before a single, impartial federal judge," Transocean said in a prepared statement. The company added it was taking this action at the instruction of its insurers to preserve coverage.

Vessel owners routinely seek such protection following accidents at sea, lawyers say.

Still, the petition, filed in U.S. District Court in Houston, was likely to rile workers who escaped the burning rig and have filed suit or any of the estates of the 11 workers who died in the April 20 fire.

"They get to fix the venue and they get to slow everything down," said Kurt Arnold of Houston-based law firm Arnold & Itkin, who is representing several survivors of the accident.

Under the Limitation of Liability Act of 1851, a vessel owner is liable only for the post-accident value of the vessel and cargo, so long as the owner can show he or she had no knowledge of negligence in the accident, maritime lawyers say.

The law was used successfully by the owners of the Titanic to limit their liability following the famous ship's 1912 sinking.

Drilling rigs count as vessels under U.S. maritime law, and since "the remains of the...Deepwater Horizon now lay sunken" about a mile deep in the federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the value of the rig and its cargo comes to no more than $26,764,083, Transocean said in the filing.

Before the accident, the rig was worth around $650 million.

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Mr. Obama's brief Rose Garden remarks came ahead of a new round of hearings on Capitol Hill next week on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the administration's response to it. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and other officials will face questions about the government's readiness to handle a significant oil spill, and about the alleged lax supervision of offshore drilling by the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service.

Mr. Salazar said this week that he would split the agency into regulatory and revenue-collecting arms. On Friday, Mr. Obama said he ordered a "top to bottom" overhaul of the agency.

"It is pretty clear that the system failed, and it failed badly," Mr. Obama said. "And for that, there is enough responsibility to go around. And all parties should be willing to accept it."

The MMS's approach to offshore drilling has come under criticism from other government agencies. In a September 2009 letter, Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, raised a host of environmental concerns about a preliminary MMS plan for oil and gas development on the Outer Continental Shelf through 2015, and suggested that MMS was downplaying the risk of spills.

A 2010 Government Accountability Office report found that MMS employees at the Alaska Outer Continental Shelf regional office didn't share information. Staff analysts in the MMS's environmental-assessment section told GAO investigators this "hindered their ability to complete sound environmental analyses."

Mr. Obama's order on environmental reviews came as the Center for Biological Diversity said it intended to file suit against the Interior Department for approving hundreds of offshore drilling permits since January 2009 without proper reviews of the potential danger to marine mammals. Wilma Lewis, Interior's assistant secretary for land management, said the MMS would strengthen data-sharing and would develop a handbook by December 2010 for conducting analyses under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Meanwhile, BP PLC outlined its latest plan to stop the flow of oil: Inserting a pipe into the broken pipe that had linked the well to the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that exploded and sank last month. If successful, the smaller pipe would suck out oil before it mixes with seawater and bring it to a tanker. BP also has a backup plan, involving lowering a "top hat" onto the leak.

Also on Friday, the Coast Guard said the Environmental Protection Agency approved the use of chemicals called dispersants to break up oil under water. These chemicals are usually used only on the surface, and environmental groups are concerned that using them in deep water might pose harm to sea life.

BP's inability to cap the well so far is becoming an issue for lawmakers who question whether the industry has under-invested in technology to deal with deepwater spills.

The government and BP are facing growing skepticism about their official estimates that 5,000 barrels of oil a day are gushing from the well. An NOAA official said that agency was preparing new computer models to forecast the slick's path over several months, and working on a worst-case scenario assuming some 50,000 barrels a day of oil are pouring into the water.

Mr. Obama also chided BP and other companies involved in operating the rig for creating a "ridiculous spectacle" at hearings this week. Executives from BP, rig owner Transocean Ltd. and drilling contractor Halliburton Corp. each suggested another of the companies was at fault.

Interior Department officials—under pressure from native and environmental groups to halt the activity—say their final drilling permits will be contingent on new safety reviews.

Last fall, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved Shell's plans to drill five exploratory wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas after the area was opened to oil and gas leasing in 2008 by the Bush administration. But Interior still has to sign off on the permits, and officials there now say their decision would rest, in part, on the outcome of a federal review President Barack Obama ordered completed by May 28 of safety issues pertaining to drilling in U.S. offshore waters.

Meanwhile, a coalition of 14 environmental groups joined by the village of Point Hope, Alaska, sent a letter to Mr. Salazar on May 5 asking him to reconsider Shell's approval on grounds that the Minerals Management Service, the Interior Department agency that regulates offshore drilling, didn't "analyze or disclose the effects of a large oil spill" from the exploratory drilling when the MMS approved it.

On May 3, the Northwest Arctic Borough—populated mostly by Alaskan native people—wrote to the MMS urging that Shell's plans be suspended or revoked until the cause of the April 20 spill can be determined.

A key concern among all the groups: that a giant spill in the Arctic Ocean would devastate the fragile environment, and wreak havoc on the culture and economy of native villages that depend on subsistence hunting of marine creatures like the bowhead whale. "The ocean is our garden," said Earl Kingik, a tribal elder in the Inupiat community of Point Hope. "If any oil spills in our garden, the currents would blow it to us."

Arctic drilling in Alaska has been mostly confined to coastal land areas, but both the industry and state are pushing to open new fields offshore to help keep oil flowing through the aging Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

Shell officials say they have no plans to delay their drilling, but said the Gulf spill didn't help the Anglo-Dutch company's public-relations efforts. "Yeah, I woke up that day [of the spill] and said, 'Yes, this truly will impact the way people look at this industry,' " said Pete Slaiby, a Shell vice president in Anchorage.

As part of the federal safety review, MMS Director Elizabeth Birnbaum on May 6 sent a letter to Shell officials asking for an accounting of any additional safety procedures that the company is proposing in light of the Gulf spill. That disaster, she wrote to Shell Oil Co. President Marvin Odum, "highlights the importance of taking every step necessary to ensure the safety of all offshore drilling operations."

But Shell officials said the Arctic drilling poses less of a threat of a disastrous spill than the Gulf, in part because of differences in geography.

One difference, Mr. Slaiby said, is that the BP well at 5,000 feet deep on the Gulf floor was under far greater pressure than Shell's would be, because the seabed where the exploratory drilling is to take place is only about 150 feet deep. He added that his company's drilling sites also would be surrounded by ice much of the year, helping to hold any spilled oil in place for a cleanup.

Shell officials also say they will have the protective barriers known as boom, ice cutters and equipment in place to respond quickly to any spill.

But critics question the effectiveness of a response given the remoteness of the Arctic, and say it would be hard to contain any oil during the spring season when the icepack moves a great deal.

"It would be impossible to control it," said Richard Steiner, a former marine-biology professor at the University of Alaska and a longtime industry critic.

Shell officials say they could clean oil in any ice condition, and point to an industry-commissioned study completed in 2009 that concluded a spill in ice-covered waters can be easier to control and clean up than in non-icy waters.

Even more important than spill response, though, is prevention, Shell officials say. "The idea is, we don't want a spill," Mr. Slaiby said. "This is devastating to us, too."

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Michael Williams, a Transocean employee who was chief electronics technician on the rig, said there was "confusion" between those high-ranking officials in an 11 a.m. meeting on the day of the blast, according to a sworn statement from Mr. Williams reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Williams himself attended the meeting.

The confusion over the drilling plan in the final hours leading up to the explosion could be key to understanding the causes of the blowout and ultimately who was responsible.

What is known from drilling records and congressional testimony is that after the morning meeting, the crew began preparations to remove from the drill pipe heavy drilling "mud" that provides pressure to keep down any gas, and to replace this mud with lighter seawater.

The crew removed the mud before setting a final 300-foot cement plug that is typically poured as a last safeguard to prevent combustible gas from rising to the surface. They never got the opportunity to set the plug. Mr. Williams declined to be interviewed. In his sworn statement, he described the meeting as including ranking personnel from BP, Transocean and Halliburton Co., a contractor that dealt with cementing the well.

According to Mr. Williams's account, Transocean's rig manager, Jimmy Wayne Harrell, was discussing the plans for the next few hours' work, including taking out the drilling mud and running a test to make sure gas wasn't seeping into the well. Mr. Harrell said in the meeting he had received the plans from BP.

Then, according to Mr. Williams's statement, the top-ranked BP employee assigned to the rig, Donald Vidrine, disagreed and said "that was not the correct procedure."

A Transocean driller in charge of the crew, Dewey Revette, tried to ease the tension. "We'll get it worked out. Let's get up there and go to work," he said, according to Mr. Williams's statement. Mr. Revette, 48 years old, was among 11 workers who died on the rig.

At about this point in the meeting, according to Mr. Williams's attorney, Scott Bickford, all other employees were asked to leave the room so that Messrs. Vidrine and Harrell could talk in private. Mr. Williams's statement doesn't include a reference to asking others to leave.

It's not clear what position either BP's Mr. Vidrine or Transocean's Mr. Harrell took on when the drilling mud should be removed. Mr. Williams's statement said only that the disagreement concerned taking out the mud, running a "negative pressure" test on the well, and dealing with a piece of equipment called a seal assembly.

It also isn't clear whether Mr. Vidrine or Mr. Harrell won the day.

Typically well owner BP would have final say, since it was paying roughly $1 million a day to lease the rig and pay for services from 12 companies that had people on the rig.

What is clear is that workers soon began displacing the mud. Later that afternoon a pressure test provided ambiguous readings, a possible sign of gas seeping in, according to what Rep. Henry Waxman says a BP executive told House investigators. Eventually, in the evening, after further tests, BP made a decision to carry forth in removing more drilling mud. The rig blew about 10 p.m.

A BP spokesman, asked about the account in Mr. Williams's statement, said: "We're simply not going to comment on that sort of detail or speculation about causes." BP's Mr. Vidrine couldn't be reached for comment.

A Transocean spokesman said the company couldn't provide details of the meeting's discussion.

A woman who answered the phone at the residence of Transocean's Mr. Harrell, and who identified herself as his wife, said he would have no comment.

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