Family Awarded $82.5 Million After Fatal Hood County Gas Plant Explosion
After trial: Hanover, found 90 percent at fault, is liable for all compensatory damages under Texas law, but $25 million of the award is exemplary and Texas caps exemplary damages; the signed judgment is not public.
Won by The Ammons Law Firm LLP.
A Harris County jury found Hanover Compression L.P. (later Exterran Energy Solutions L.P.) grossly negligent in the 2007 explosion of a hot oil heater at a Quicksilver Resources natural gas plant in Hood County, Texas, that killed 27-year-old plant worker Joshua Wade Petrie. The jury assigned Hanover 90 percent of the responsibility and Quicksilver 10 percent, and in June 2010 awarded Petrie's widow, his three young children and his father a combined $82.5 million, a total that included $25 million in punitive damages against Hanover. Rob Ammons and Bennett Midlo of The Ammons Law Firm represented the family. Quicksilver, as Petrie's employer, carried workers' compensation coverage and was not itself on the hook for the damages award.
What happened
Joshua Wade Petrie was 27 years old and working at a natural gas processing plant in Hood County, Texas, on May 25, 2007, when he tried to start a hot oil heater at the facility. The heater exploded. Petrie was critically injured and died the next day, leaving behind his wife, Candee, and three young children.
The plant belonged to Fort Worth based Quicksilver Resources, which employed Petrie. But Hanover Compression L.P., the company that had engineered, built and sold the plant to Quicksilver in 2005, was supposed to have fully refurbished the facility, including the heater, before handing it over. The heater was not new equipment. It had been moved to the Hood County site from an older plant Hanover had owned in Oklahoma. At trial, Petrie's family argued that Hanover never brought the relocated heater up to current industry safety standards, and that it went back into service without the purge system and safety valves that would have kept gas from collecting inside it and igniting.
The case went to trial in the 152nd District Court in Harris County. In June 2010, the jury agreed with the family. It found Hanover grossly negligent and assigned it 90 percent of the responsibility for Petrie's death. Quicksilver, as the plant's owner, was found 10 percent responsible.
The jury returned a total award of $82.5 million, split among Petrie's widow, his three children, who were 2, 5 and 7 years old at the time of trial, and his father. Of that total, $25 million was punitive damages against Hanover, which the jury could award because it had found the company grossly negligent.
Quicksilver's 10 percent share of fault did not translate into a payment obligation. Rob Ammons, who tried the case for the Petrie family with Bennett Midlo, explained after the verdict that Quicksilver had provided workers' compensation coverage for its employee, which under Texas law shielded the company from additional monetary liability to the family even though the jury had found it partly at fault. Hanover, later renamed Exterran Energy Solutions L.P., was left to answer for the verdict.
Within days of the verdict, Hanover's parent company told investors in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that its share of the claim was covered by third party insurance, that it had already satisfied its deductible, and that it did not expect to make further payments or incur additional expense on the matter. No appeal of the verdict turned up in the free appellate databases, no reduction of the award was reported, and no opinion in the case appears in the Texas appellate reporters. The amount of the final judgment the trial court signed is not in any public record we were able to reach.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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