What to Do After a Plant Explosion

“The first thing that the plant is doing is they have rapid response lawyers on speed dial.”

Large industrial employers bring in outside counsel early, and once they do, the internal investigation runs through those lawyers. That is deliberate. An attorney-directed investigation can be withheld in discovery as work product, so what a company learns about its own accident may never reach the people who were hurt by it.

Evidence also goes away without anyone deciding to destroy it. Camera systems overwrite on a schedule, emails and texts fall inside routine retention policies, and damaged equipment gets hauled off during cleanup. Coworkers give recorded statements early, before anyone tells them those statements will be read back at trial.

What Has to Happen on Your Side

A spoliation letter puts the company on notice to preserve evidence, and it has to be specific to do any good: the cameras, the inspection and maintenance records for the equipment that failed, the people whose emails and texts need to be held, and the parts themselves. Once it’s served, destroying any of that carries consequences at trial.

You have two years to file suit in Texas, but the evidence question gets settled long before that.

“If you don’t get the right lawyer, the company, the plant will run over you and your not-very-good lawyer.”

Whether a company takes the letter seriously depends on who signed it. Arnold & Itkin has tried plant and refinery cases to verdict against companies of every size. Our plant explosion lawyers can be on the ground the same day the company’s are, and there’s no fee unless we win. More on how these cases get built, including what changes when a Texas employer is a non-subscriber, is on our plant and refinery accident page.

Full Transcript

If someone’s hurt in a plant explosion, the first thing you gotta do is take care of their health and their safety. Next thing you need to do is make sure that you talk to a lawyer, not just any lawyer, a lawyer that really has the expertise, the track record to handle a plant or an industrial incident case.

Because I’ll tell you, the first thing that the plant is doing is they have rapid response lawyers on speed dial who are out there doing what they need to do to try to cover up what happened and why it happened, and make it harder for someone to get a recovery. You need somebody there who’s immediately making sure the evidence is preserved, who’s fighting for your rights, because every minute, every hour of delay favors the company.

It gives them a chance to access the video cameras that sometimes end up mysteriously offline when the incident happened. It gives them a chance to accidentally delete emails and text messages. It gives them the chance to corner witnesses and get them to say things that, frankly, just aren’t true. But once they’re committed to a statement, that person’s story is now put down.

What you need to do immediately, and it sounds terrible, is you need to have a lawyer there to make sure that your rights aren’t being taken advantage of by the plant or the company. But it’s important that you call the right lawyer, because if you don’t get the right lawyer, the company, the plant will run over you and your not-very-good lawyer. Get the best. Get somebody who will stand up for you and make sure that your rights are being protected.

I mean, we’ve seen it firsthand, from big companies to small companies. They will do whatever they think they have to to avoid taking responsibility for hurting or killing people. 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.