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I've got e-mails flying, but I haven't worked West Texas in twenty years so I'm out of touch.

Some things we can learn from these pictures:

That's probably a twenty thousand foot rig, not that means a lot is today's scarcity of rigs. A twenty thousand foot rig might be drilling a ten thousand foot well.

We can also see three bulk barite tanks from the flare. That means they were probably using fourteen pound or better mud weights, which in West Texas means they were drilling through the Pennsylvanian which in the Permian Basin is around 12,000' to 15,000'.

Now to throw a kink in all of that, the Yates comes in around 3000', and it can be charged from lower zones and need at least eighteen pound mud to hold.

You can see from the first picture that the biggest explosion is under the rig floor. That means either the BOPs failed or the casing ruptured.
In the case of a casing rupture, there should have been time enough while the pressure was climbing to get everyone to safety.
If the BOPs failed, it might have been a sudden catastrophe.