On the afternoon of May 28, a soil-test crew was boring into the ground beside the Clyde apartments on East Ninth Street, in the Bishop Arts area of Oak Cliff, when it struck a natural gas line. Minutes later the building exploded. Marisol Perez and her young son Erick were killed. So was Sylvia Collins, a neighbor and a longtime Dallas County precinct chair. Marisol’s nine-year-old daughter, Vanessa, survived — and woke into a life without her mother and brother. Five more people were hurt. The National Transportation Safety Board sent a team, because this was not a kitchen accident or a frayed wire. A company put a drill into the ground next to people’s homes, and a gas line that was supposed to be located and protected was not.
We name them on purpose, because the companies behind this will spend the coming months turning Marisol, Erick, and Sylvia into “the incident,” and turning a preventable explosion into “an unfortunate event.” We are Attorney911 (The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC), principal office in Houston, and we built our practice on cases exactly like this one — including a litigation history that reaches the BP Texas City refinery explosion. Before we ask anything of a survivor or a grieving family, this page arms you: who is responsible when a gas line is struck and a building comes down, what Texas law requires of the companies that dig and the utility that owns the pipe, what evidence is already being shaped, and what to do next. The consultation is free, you pay nothing unless we win, and we serve Dallas families in English and in Spanish. 1-888-ATTY-911.
Who is to blame — the companies, named
A gas explosion is never one company’s failure. It is a chain, and Texas law lets us pursue every link. Here is the chain reported in this case, with the investigation still open and no one yet adjudicated at fault:
- The drilling crew. A truck belonging to Barba Drilling Company was photographed boring at the Clyde complex when the gas leak began, and an attorney for the destroyed complex has publicly pointed to a North Texas drilling company as responsible. The company that put the bit in the ground bears the first, hardest questions: did it call in the line locates the law requires, did it dig where it was cleared to dig, did it stop the instant it smelled gas.
- The engineering firm. Engineering Consultant Services (ECS) was conducting the soil testing that put that crew on that spot. An engineering firm that designs and directs a boring program owns the duty to do it safely around buried utilities.
- The party that ordered the work. O-SDA Industries, a prospective buyer of the complex, commissioned the soil test. A company that hires the work can share responsibility for how safely it was carried out on an occupied residential property.
- The gas utility. Atmos Energy owns and operates the pipeline. Atmos has denied responsibility, saying “a construction company unrelated to Atmos Energy damaged a natural gas pipeline” — but a survivor has already filed suit against Atmos, and a utility’s duties to mark its lines accurately, respond to a reported leak fast enough, and maintain a safe system are squarely in play. Public-radio reporting found that excavators damaged Texas gas lines thousands of times in a single year; the question in every one of those is whether the line was where the utility said it was, and whether the dig followed the rules.
Naming the companies is not the end of the work — it is the start. Finding which of them carried which insurance, and proving how the failure moved down the chain, is what turns a tragedy into accountability.
What Texas law requires of anyone who digs — and of the utility
Texas does not leave digging near gas lines to common sense. State law requires anyone excavating to notify the one-call system (Texas 811) before breaking ground, so the utilities can come mark their buried lines, and it requires the excavator to dig carefully around those marks. When a crew bores into a gas line, the first questions are whether a valid locate request was made, whether the lines were marked, and whether the crew dug outside the cleared zone. A violation of those duties is powerful evidence of negligence. The gas utility carries its own duties — to locate accurately when called, to maintain its system, and to respond to a reported leak with the urgency a neighborhood full of families demands. A wrongful-death and survival case here is built on which of those duties failed, and whose.
The injuries a gas explosion causes — and why they are catastrophic
A natural-gas explosion does its harm three ways at once, and the defense will try to minimize each. The blast wave itself causes traumatic brain injury and internal organ damage that a first scan can miss. The fire causes burns that, in Texas, often mean being flown out of the area — the state has no nationally verified burn center, so the most severely burned are sent to Lubbock or out of state for months of staged surgeries, hundreds of miles from family, with disfigurement and lifelong pain. And the collapse causes crush injuries and the prolonged compression that can shut down the kidneys. For the families of Marisol and Erick Perez and Sylvia Collins, the loss is total; for the survivors and the injured, the cost runs across a lifetime, and the companies’ insurers are already working to make sure it is undercounted.
The evidence is being shaped right now
The proof of a gas-explosion case is perishable and contested from day one. The 811 locate tickets, the drilling logs, the line-marking records, the gas-utility’s leak and maintenance history, the dispatch timeline from the first reported smell of gas to the blast — every one of these is a record that decides the case, and every one sits in the hands of a company with a reason to control it. A same-day preservation demand freezes it. The NTSB investigation will produce findings that matter, but a family cannot wait for a federal report to protect its rights or to lock down the evidence before it is “lost.” The day you call is the day the clock starts working for the family instead of the companies.
What these cases are worth — and where the money comes from
No honest lawyer promises a number, and anyone who quotes you an “average” is selling something. But a gas-explosion case is different money than people expect, because the blame is shared across several solvent companies — the drilling contractor, the engineering firm, the party that commissioned the work, and the gas utility — each with its own commercial insurance, and because Texas allows wrongful-death damages for a family’s losses, survival damages for what the victims endured, and exemplary damages where the conduct was grossly negligent. Finding every responsible company and every policy is the work that decides the recovery, and it is exactly the work most firms never do.
The playbook already running
None of what is happening is bad luck — it is procedure, and one of our attorneys learned it from the inside. Lupe Peña spent years as an insurance-defense lawyer before crossing to this side of the table. Watch the moves: a utility issues a statement distancing itself within days, the companies point at one another, and an insurer reaches out to a grieving family “to help” while a recorded statement and a fast, small check are prepared. We answer it with same-day preservation letters, an independent investigation that does not wait for the federal one, and the records demanded before they can quietly disappear.
The first steps for a survivor or a family
- Get full medical care now, even for those who walked away — blast brain injury and internal harm hide for hours.
- Give no recorded statement and sign nothing from any company or insurer involved. You can be polite and still say no.
- Do not let the scene or the equipment be cleared before it is documented — the drill, the bore site, and the line are evidence.
- Gather the names of every company connected to the work — the driller, the engineering firm, the property and its prospective buyer, the gas utility — and call a lawyer before the settlement process starts.
Para las familias de habla hispana de Dallas
Si usted sobrevivió o perdió a un ser querido en la explosión de gas en Oak Cliff — como la familia Perez — usted tiene derechos que las empresas esperan que nunca conozca. Una explosión de gas casi nunca es culpa de una sola compañía: la empresa que perforó el suelo, la firma de ingeniería que dirigió la prueba, la compañía que ordenó el trabajo y la empresa de gas que es dueña de la línea pueden compartir la responsabilidad, y cada una tiene su propio seguro. La compañía de gas ya está diciendo que no es su culpa, y los aseguradores ya tienen un plan: la llamada “amistosa” que es una declaración grabada, el cheque rápido con una renuncia. No firme nada ni dé ninguna declaración antes de hablar con un abogado. Hablamos español. La consulta es gratis y no cobramos nada a menos que ganemos. Llame al 1-888-ATTY-911.
Why Attorney911
Two things make this firm the right one for a gas-explosion case. The first is Ralph Manginello, who has spent more than 27 years in Texas courtrooms, including federal court, and whose litigation history reaches the BP Texas City refinery explosion — there are very few personal-injury lawyers in this state who have stood in an explosion case against a corporation of that size, and he is one of them. The second is Lupe Peña, the former insurance-defense attorney who now turns that playbook against the companies that taught it to him, in English and in Spanish.
The firm has recovered more than $50 million for the families it has represented, including multi-million-dollar results for traumatic brain injury, burns, amputation, and wrongful death. We send same-day preservation letters, we advance the costs of building the case — the fire-origin and gas experts, the engineers, the life-care planners these cases require — the consultation is free and available around the clock, and you pay nothing unless we win. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome; every case depends on its own facts. Our principal office is in Houston, with additional offices in Austin and Beaumont. Call 1-888-ATTY-911 or reach us here any time. See also our wrongful-death, explosion and refinery, and construction pages.
Questions Dallas families are asking right now
Who can be sued for the Oak Cliff gas explosion?
Potentially several companies, because the responsibility is shared: the drilling contractor whose crew struck the line, the engineering firm that directed the soil testing, the party that commissioned the work, and the gas utility that owns the pipeline. The investigation is ongoing and no one has yet been found legally at fault, but each company’s records, insurance, and conduct are squarely in play, and a survivor has already filed suit against Atmos Energy.
The gas company says it was not their fault. Does that end it?
No. A utility distancing itself in a press statement is the beginning of the fight, not the end of it. Texas law imposes duties on the utility to mark its lines accurately, maintain its system, and respond to a reported leak — and it imposes duties on the company that dug. Which duty failed, and whose, is exactly what a thorough investigation and the preserved records decide.
A loved one died in the explosion. What can the family recover?
A Texas wrongful-death claim compensates the family’s losses — the loss of support and of the relationship itself — and a separate survival claim covers what the victim endured before death. Where a company’s conduct was grossly negligent, Texas allows exemplary damages. We handle the steps families never see coming and walk you through each one on the first call.
What does it cost to hire you?
Nothing up front. We work on contingency: no hourly bill, we advance the investigation costs, and you pay a percentage only out of what we recover — nothing if we do not win. The consultation is free, day or night, at 1-888-ATTY-911. Here is how contingency fees work.