Texas Border Business
Texas Border Business
A Texas jury has awarded $812 million — comprising $203 million in compensatory damages and $609 million in punitive damages — to the wife and two daughters of a worker killed in an explosion at the Pecos Liquids Handling Facility in Pecos, Texas. Lead counsel Rob Ammons and Herbie Montalvo of The Ammons Law Firm, alongside co-counsel Omar Escobar Jr. of the Escobar Law Firm and Jesus A. Zambrano and Edgar E. Garcia of the Zambrano Law Firm, secured the verdict following a two-week trial in the 381st Judicial District Court of Starr County against Upton Assets, LLC, the facility’s owner.
“When members of our community go to West Texas to work in the oilfields, companies must treat them with dignity and respect,” said Jesse Zambrano of the Zambrano Law Firm. “Upton Assets spent over two years blaming a hardworking and responsible man. However, a Starr County jury rejected their position completely and held the plant owner fully responsible,” said Zambrano.
The case, Cause No. DC-23-465, was filed in the 381st Judicial District Court of Starr County, Texas, and went to a two-week trial against Upton Assets, LLC, the owner of the Facility. Other defendants settled before trial.
Throughout this litigation, Upton Assets refused to accept any responsibility for the explosion that killed our clients’ husband and father. The company maintained that the worker himself was at fault for his own death and declined to offer any meaningful accountability to the wife and daughters he left behind. That position did not change over two and a half years of litigation, nor when the case went to trial.
The Pecos Liquids Handling Facility, where the incident occurred, is a Process Safety Management facility, a federal designation reserved for facilities handling highly hazardous materials. That designation imposes mandatory safety protocols, including trained personnel, documented procedures, hot work permits, and rigorous contractor oversight. The evidence at trial established that Upton Assets had none of these measures in place.
The facility’s owner admitted under oath that he had never read the Process Safety Management standard applicable to his own facility and could not identify a single employee who had. His on-site facility manager had no Process Safety Management training, no relevant qualifications, and no management experience. Workers hired to perform piping installation at the facility, who had traveled over 500 miles from their homes in South Texas, were never given the facility’s safety manual, never received safety training or orientation, and were never provided with the required permits before performing hot work near flammable materials. They worked for weeks without pay.
Days before the explosion, the facility manager directed one of the workers to open a valve that caused liquid hydrocarbons to flood the containment area to a depth of four to five inches, directly where the workers were required to continue operations. A tank cleaning contractor was brought in to remediate the area, left without completing the work, and falsely assured the workers that the area was clean and safe. No atmospheric testing was performed. No hot work permit was issued.
Upton Assets’ own post-incident safety consultant, retained by the defendants following the explosion, testified that there was “literally zero documentation” for the work being performed. In decades of safety experience, he stated, he could not name a single company that cares about safety that would have operated this way. He characterized the conduct as deplorable and confirmed that had Upton Assets followed its own written safety policies, the explosion would not have occurred.
The jury assigned 100% of the fault to Upton Assets, zero percent to the worker who died, and found unanimously that the company’s conduct rose to the level of gross negligence. After two weeks of trial, they returned a verdict of $203 million in compensatory damages and $609 million in punitive damages for our clients.
“We hope this verdict sends a strong message to all oil and gas companies in the State of Texas that if they don’t train our local workers, and they don’t give them proper equipment, causing deaths and serious injuries, we will fight for them and their families so that justice may be done,” said Edgar Garcia of the Zambrano Law Firm.
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About the Zambrano Law Firm
Zambrano Law Firm is a McAllen-based personal injury law firm that handles catastrophic injury and wrongful death cases across Texas. The firm, founded by Jesse Zambrano, has secured significant jury verdicts and settlements, collecting millions for clients, and it handles cases through referral counsel and joint venture agreements. Learn more at zambranolawfirm.com.
