Who’s Responsible for Land Rig Accidents?

More Than One Company Can Be at Fault

A land drilling job is run by several companies at once. The operator, usually called the oil company, holds the lease and hires everyone else. It often has its own representative on location, the company man. The drilling contractor typically owns the rig and employs the rig crew. Service companies come and go for specific jobs like cementing, wireline, and well testing, and the equipment was built and sold by still other companies.

“A lot of times, we see that there’s multiple things that went wrong. There may be a drilling contractor at fault. It might be the oil company that cheaped out on making sure that there was well protection.”

That structure matters for an injured worker. If your employer carries workers’ compensation, you generally can’t sue your employer, but that bar generally doesn’t protect the other companies on the site. Under Texas law you can collect workers’ compensation and still bring a claim against another company whose negligence caused the injury. For contractor employees, claims against the operator have an added hurdle: Chapter 95 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code generally requires showing that the operator controlled how the work was done, knew about the danger, and failed to adequately warn.

How We Find Out What Happened

A drilling rig produces a paper trail every day. Daily drilling reports record what the crew did and when. Job safety analyses and permits show what hazards were identified before the work started. Maintenance and inspection records, blowout preventer test records, emails, text messages, and camera footage fill in the rest. 

Early in a case, we send a written demand that every company involved preserve all of it.

“We start taking the testimony of the witnesses involved, and not just the witnesses involved in the incident, the witnesses involved in the events leading up to the incident, to make sure that we understand not just what’s on paper, but what people say under oath.”

Depositions are where the documents get tested. Supervisors and crew members answer questions from both sides, and their answers are checked against the records. In one oilfield case, our attorneys took 30 depositions in 2 months and secured a $139 million settlement for multiple injured workers a week before trial. See our land rig accident page for more.

What Oil Companies Do After an Accident

A settlement offer comes with a release. A signed release can end a claim for good, so it’s worth having a lawyer read it first. Texas law does give families some protection when evidence goes missing. A court can instruct a jury about evidence a party destroyed when it had a duty to keep it, but usually only if the evidence was destroyed on purpose or its loss left the family with no meaningful way to prove the case. That high bar is the reason preservation letters go out early. In a death case, the surviving spouse, children, and parents can bring a wrongful death claim, generally within two years of the death. Our oilfield accident lawyers can explain what applies to your family.

Full Transcript

When something terrible happens, you know, on a land rig or a drilling site, figuring out what went wrong and why is really important. And a lot of times, we see that there’s multiple things that went wrong. There may be a drilling contractor at fault. It might be the oil company that cheaped out on making sure that there was well protection. It may be that, you know, there’s a certain crew that did or didn’t do their job right.

Each situation is really different. In some situations, the rig owner could be ultimately responsible. After all, it’s their rig. It’s their responsibility. It’s their job to make sure things are done safe. You know, sometimes they don’t have the proper supervision, the proper planning, the proper resources to make sure things are done right. And sometimes the oil company, occasionally, will do things right. But, you know, some other contractor or somebody else messed up. And that’s why it’s really, really important to have somebody come at it with an open mind, investigate all the facts, and figure out what went wrong and why.

Sometimes there’s video footage. Oftentimes, there’s emails. There’s text messages. There’s literally thousands and thousands of pages of documents and video footage that we have to go through to understand, how did this particular incident happen at this particular time? And then, once we do, we start taking the testimony of the witnesses involved, and not just the witnesses involved in the incident, the witnesses involved in the events leading up to the incident, to make sure that we understand not just what’s on paper, but what people say under oath. And that way, you get a full picture of who is responsible, hold them accountable, and make sure it doesn’t happen to somebody else.

Almost without fail, if something terrible happens on a land rig or a drilling site, the oil companies immediately call a crisis response team. That begins a, for lack of a better word, it’s a cover-up. All of a sudden, things go missing. Videotape disappears or wasn’t working. Text messages and emails are lost. Documents are hidden away somewhere or shredded, or worse. Then they try to start working on the families, to do a deal, to do what’s right for the company.

There’s a famous scene, for those of you that watch the show Landman, where this lawyer talks this poor widow into taking what really is a cheap settlement. And things like that happen in the real world. And that’s why families need a real lawyer who will stand up to the oil company’s lawyers and do the right thing by them, because otherwise, families get run over by these oil companies all the time.

Call us, email us, text us. We’ll respond and hold the people who did it accountable and make sure that your family’s taken care of.