Midland Oilfield Accident Lawyer
Midland is where the decisions get made. The well plan, the mud program, the casing design and the schedule all come out of an office in this town, and then somebody eighty miles away has to make them work in the dark.
That matters when things go wrong, because the company that wrote the plan is rarely the company whose name is on your paycheck. Alex Horton is Board Certified in Personal Injury Trial Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization and he tries cases. If you were hurt on a rig, a lease or a location anywhere in the Midland Basin, call and tell us what happened.
Board Certified in Personal Injury Trial Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization. Texas Super Lawyer for more than ten years. Former clerk at the Supreme Court of Texas. More about Alex Horton
Four questions come up on nearly every call from a Midland County location. Here are the answers, and then what to do about them.
If one of them is urgent, go straight there: what actually happens out here, how dangerous the work really is, who is supposed to be watching, or what to do in the first 48 hours.
What are the most common Midland oilfield accidents?
Explosions and fires, loss of well control, pressure and iron failures, struck by and caught between injuries, and trucking. In the Midland Basin the drilling and completions side dominates, which shifts the mix compared with the yards and staging work further west.
Rig Explosions & Fires
Land rig fires, tank battery ignition, hot work near vapor and flash fires on completions. Explosion terms are the single largest theme in Midland search, and these cases need scene work in days because the location gets cleaned up and put back to work.
Well Blowouts
Loss of well control never involves one company. Preventer records, mud logs, cement job tickets and the decisions made in the hours before are where these get decided.
Well Blowout Claims →Frac & Pressure Pumping
Iron failures, whipping lines, treating line leaks and silica exposure from sand handling. Pressure test records show what the crew was told before they were sent in.
Struck By & Caught Between
Pinch points between trucks, trailers and equipment on a crowded pad. These are the injuries employers most often write up as the worker's own fault, and the write up is rarely the whole story.
Falls And Dropped Objects
Derrick work, working at height on tank batteries, and anything dropped from the rig floor onto the crew below. Fall protection and dropped object prevention are both written standards nobody has time for.
Trucking And Lease Roads
Highway 191, Loop 250, State Highway 158 and I 20 move crews and iron around the clock, plus thousands of miles of caliche with no shoulder. These are oilfield cases even when they happen on asphalt.
Chemical And Gas Exposure
Hydrogen sulphide, treating chemicals and confined space work. Monitors that were not calibrated, alarms that were silenced and briefings that never happened show up in these files repeatedly.
Equipment And Crane Failure
Rig moves, tank setting and lifting on location. Load charts, telematics data and ground condition records decide who answers for it, and the machine is repaired and gone inside a week.
For the wider picture, see the common causes of oilfield and oil rig accidents and the safety violations that turn up most often on oil rigs.
What is the Permian Basin accident rate?
Higher than the published numbers suggest, and that is the more useful answer. Oil and gas extraction has run well above the national average fatality rate for as long as it has been measured, and the way the counting works means the real figure for a place like the Midland Basin is almost certainly worse than the official one.
Contractor injuries land somewhere else. Federal injury statistics are sorted by the industry code of the employer, not the industry of the worksite. A hand hurt on a Midland lease working for a trucking company, a crane outfit or a construction contractor is counted as trucking, or crane hire, or construction. On a pad where most of the people are contractors, most of the injuries leave the oil and gas column entirely.
Road deaths get counted as road deaths. A disproportionate share of oilfield fatalities happen in vehicles, driving to and from location or hauling for it. Those show up as roadway incidents rather than as extraction fatalities.
Plenty never gets recorded at all. Not every injury is recordable, plans and contractor scoring systems create real pressure not to record, and near misses that should be warnings are closed out internally and never leave the company.
None of that is an argument for guessing. It is an argument for getting the actual records in your case, because the pattern that matters is not the national rate. It is what happened on that location, on that rig, with that crew, in the months before you were hurt.
- The OSHA 300 log for that worksite
- Prior incident and near miss reports on the same rig
- The contractor's safety prequalification record
- Toolbox talks and JSAs for the days before
- Crew rotation and hours worked
- Any stop work authority that was used, or was not
A documented prior incident on the same rig or the same crew is worth more than any statistic, because it shows the company already knew.
Who regulates safety on a Midland lease?
Several agencies, none of them continuously, and not one of them works for you. The gaps between them are wider than most people assume, and the most important safety rules on a Midland lease are usually the operator's own.
Railroad Commission Of Texas
Regulates oil and gas operations in Texas, including casing, cementing, well control and hydrogen sulphide requirements. It is an operations regulator rather than a worker safety agency, which is a distinction people miss constantly.
OSHA
The worker safety agency, investigating deaths and serious injuries. There is no dedicated oil and gas standard for onshore extraction, so OSHA works from general industry rules and the general duty clause, and some major standards carve the drilling and servicing side out altogether.
FMCSA And Texas DPS
Commercial trucking, including hours of service, driver qualification and vehicle maintenance. A large share of Basin fatalities sit under this heading rather than the oilfield one.
The Operator Itself
In practice the rules that govern a location come from the operator: the contractor prequalification score, the site specific safety plan, the permit system and stop work authority. Those are the standards the company set for itself, and failing to meet them is often the strongest evidence in the case.
Two practical points. A regulatory citation is not automatically negligence in your civil case, though the investigation file behind it is usually far more useful than the citation. And an operator that hired a contractor with a known poor safety record has a problem that no independent contractor argument fixes. Regulations are published by OSHA, the Railroad Commission of Texas and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
What should I do in the first 48 hours?
Get treated properly, write down who was there, sign nothing, and get a preservation letter out. Almost every Basin case that goes badly goes badly because of something that did or did not happen in the first two days.
Get Treated, And Describe It Accurately
Tell the provider it was a work injury and explain the mechanism exactly. A vague chart note becomes a defence argument two years later, and an injury you did not mention on day one becomes an injury they say you did not have.
List Every Company On Location
Including the ones you did not recognise. Truck logos count. Hard hat stickers count. So does who signed the permit and who was running the job when it happened.
Sign Nothing And Say Nothing Recorded
No recorded statement, no release, no arbitration agreement, no benefit plan enrollment. If you already signed something, bring it in rather than assuming it is settled.
Get The Preservation Letters Out
To every company on that location. The failed equipment, the rig data, the permits and the original incident report all have to be named before anybody disposes of them. This is the step that most often decides the case.
Keep Your Own Record
Photographs, the names of witnesses, what you were told and by whom, and the dates on every letter you receive. Keep the envelopes.
Stay Off Social Media
Anything you post will be found, screenshotted and used, including photographs that look fine to you and a caption that reads very differently in front of a jury.
The Plan Was Written In Midland. The Injury Happened Somewhere Else.
On a Midland Basin location the operator wrote the well plan and set the schedule, a drilling contractor ran the rig, a cementing company set the casing, a mud company built the fluid, and several service companies came and went. Only one of them signs your paycheck. Any of them can be responsible.
Texas asks who had the right to control the work at the moment it went wrong, and that is decided by what happened on location rather than by what the master service agreement says. Expect the borrowed servant argument, which claims you were on loan to whichever company on location carried workers compensation, so comp is your only remedy. It turns on who actually directed the details of your work.
If your employer carries no workers compensation, that helps you. Texas is the only state that lets a private employer opt out, and one that does gives up contributory negligence, assumption of risk and the fellow servant defence. More in who is liable for oilfield injuries in Texas and how to file a lawsuit against your oilfield employer.
- The operator who controls the lease and the schedule
- The drilling or workover contractor
- The cementing and mud companies
- The pressure pumping crew
- The crane or rigging contractor
- The equipment owner or lessor
- The hauling and transport company
- Component and equipment manufacturers
- Your employer directly, if it is a nonsubscriber
The Number Is Not The Hospital Bill
Nobody can put an honest figure on a case before seeing the medical records and the earnings history. These are the categories that build it, and the ones insurers work hardest to shrink.
Future Earning Capacity
Basin money is not average money. A hand pulling six figures with overtime who cannot return to the patch has lost decades of it, not a few months of wages. This is usually the largest line in the case and the one most often left out of an early offer.
Medical, Past And Future
Emergency care, air transport, surgery, rehabilitation and the care you will still need in twenty years. Hospital liens and health plan subrogation get handled early, because left to the end they quietly take a settlement apart.
Impairment And Disfigurement
Permanent loss of function and scarring. Both are real damages under Texas law, both are separate categories, and both are routinely undervalued by adjusters.
Exemplary Damages
Where a company knew about a hazard and sent a crew in regardless, gross negligence puts exemplary damages on the table. Proving it takes the internal records, which is another reason preservation cannot wait.
Where You Get Treated And Where It Gets Filed
Midland Memorial Hospital takes most Midland County casualties. The most serious go on to the Level II trauma centre at Medical Center Hospital in Odessa, or are flown to Lubbock or the Metroplex. Burn cases almost always leave the Basin.
Civil cases in Midland County are filed in the 142nd, 238th and 385th District Courts here in Midland. Depending on where the incident happened and where the defendants do business, we also file in Ector County, Crane County and Tom Green County.
We take cases from across the Basin, including Midland, Ector, Martin, Glasscock, Upton, Reagan, Andrews and Crane counties. If you were hurt outside Midland but you live here or your crew is based here, that is still our case.
See also our Odessa oilfield injury lawyer page and our San Angelo oilfield injury lawyer page, where the office is.
Two Years, And Much Less Than That In Practice
Texas generally gives you two years from the date of injury or death to file a personal injury or wrongful death lawsuit. Some claims run shorter, and if a governmental entity is involved written notice can be due in as little as six months. The statute is at Chapter 16.
The real deadline is earlier. Equipment is repaired or scrapped, the location is regraded, the rig is released and moves on with its records, and data systems overwrite on a fixed cycle. By the time two years is a concern, the case has usually already been decided by what did or did not get preserved.
Midland Oilfield Injury Questions
My employer carries workers compensation. Do I have a case?
Very possibly. Comp blocks a claim against your own employer only. It does nothing to the operator who controlled the lease, the cementing company, the pressure pumping crew, the crane outfit, the hauler or the manufacturer of whatever failed. On a Midland location there are usually several companies, which is exactly why these cases are worth investigating.
I already signed the arbitration agreement. Is it over?
Not necessarily. Nonsubscriber arbitration agreements get set aside with some regularity, on grounds like lack of proper notice, an employer that reserved the right to change the terms, or paperwork signed while somebody was medicated in a hospital bed. Bring the documents in before you assume you are stuck.
The company says the accident was my fault. Does that end it?
No. Texas comparative fault lets you recover as long as you are not more than fifty percent responsible, and your award is reduced by your share. If your employer is a nonsubscriber it cannot raise your fault at all. Blaming the injured worker is the standard opening move, not a legal conclusion.
I work in Midland but the accident happened in another county.
That is normal out here and it does not change much. Where a case gets filed depends on where the incident happened and where the defendants do business, not on where you sleep. We file across the Basin and we handle the travel.
There was a similar incident on the same rig a few months ago.
Then say so early, because it matters a great deal. A prior incident on the same rig, the same crew or the same equipment shows the company already knew, and that is the evidence that supports a claim for exemplary damages. It is also the kind of record that quietly disappears if nobody demands it.
What does it cost to hire you?
Nothing up front. We take oilfield injury cases on a contingency fee, so we are paid a percentage of what we recover and you owe no fee if there is no recovery. The firm advances case expenses.
Hurt On A Midland Basin Location? Find Out Who Answers For It.
Board Certified in Personal Injury Trial Law. Free consultation, no fee unless we recover, and we come to Midland if you cannot travel. Bring anything the company has asked you to sign.