Midland, Odessa, Andrews Texas Power Outage Injury Lawyer — When the Lights Go Out and Someone Gets Hurt
If you are reading this because your power went out in Midland, Odessa, or Andrews and you are sitting in the dark wondering whether anyone is responsible — we want to give you the honest answer first, then the answer that might matter more than you expect. The outage itself, the fact that the electricity stopped flowing to your block, is almost never a personal injury case on its own. Texas law does not treat a service interruption, standing alone, as a tort. But the moment that outage meets a vulnerable person — a grandmother on an oxygen concentrator in a nursing home that never installed a backup generator, a family running a generator indoors because nobody warned them, a worker injured in a facility that lost power and kept operating anyway — the law changes. That is the line this page is built to help you understand. We are Attorney911, and what follows is everything we know about when a power outage stops being an inconvenience and starts being a case.
What Happened in the Permian Basin
Public reporting confirmed that Oncor — the largest transmission and distribution electric utility in Texas, operating under the ERCOT grid and regulated by the Public Utility Commission of Texas — reported power outages affecting customers across three Permian Basin cities. According to the utility’s own update, approximately 5 customers in Odessa, 10 in Midland, and 17 in Andrews were without power. The total across all three cities was roughly three dozen customers — a small-scale, localized disruption, not a grid-wide emergency.
The region these three cities occupy is the beating heart of the Texas oil and gas industry. Midland sits as the county seat of Midland County, Odessa as the seat of Ector County about twenty miles west on Interstate 20, and Andrews as the seat of Andrews County to the northeast. The same industry that fuels the local economy also loads these highways with heavy commercial truck traffic servicing oilfield operations, and it puts extraordinary demand on the electrical grid that powers the pumps, the compressors, and the facilities that never fully shut down. When the power blinks here, the consequences can travel further than the outage map suggests.
We need to be direct about what this reported event is and is not. A utility outage affecting fewer than fifty customers, with no reported injury, no fatality, no medical emergency, and no property damage meeting a legal threshold, does not present a viable personal injury or wrongful death claim under Texas law. No plaintiff firm could pursue a tort claim on those facts alone. But that does not mean the page ends here — because the people who find this page are not always the people described in the news report. They are the people who were harmed during an outage, or whose loved one was, and who need to know whether what happened to them crosses the line from bad luck to legal wrong.
When a Power Outage Becomes a Personal Injury Case
The outage is not the case. The injury caused by someone’s failure to plan for the outage is the case. That distinction is everything.
Texas tort law requires three things before a personal injury claim exists: a duty owed to the injured person, a breach of that duty, and an injury caused by that breach. A utility that delivers electricity owes its customers a duty of reasonable care in maintaining its system — but an outage alone, without more, does not prove a breach. Equipment fails. Weather happens. Wildlife contacts infrastructure. The law does not impose strict liability on a utility every time the power goes out.
What changes the analysis is what happened around the outage, and who had a duty to protect the person who got hurt. Consider the scenarios that turn a blackout into a case:
A nursing home loses power and a resident on a breathing machine suffocates because the facility had no backup generator — or had one that did not work, or had one that staff did not know how to start. The outage did not kill that resident. The facility’s failure to maintain a legally required emergency power system did. That is a premises-liability and negligence case against the facility, not a utility case.
A family loses power during a West Texas cold snap and runs a portable generator inside their garage or on an enclosed porch. Carbon monoxide fills the home. Someone is hospitalized, or dies. The generator manufacturer’s warnings may have been inadequate. A landlord may have failed to install required CO detectors. A property manager may have known the heating system was failing and did nothing. The outage was the trigger; the failure to warn or protect was the cause.
A worker at an oilfield service facility is injured when the power cuts out mid-operation — a press cycles unexpectedly, a ventilation system stops, a loading dock door drops. If the employer or the facility operator knew the power was unstable and did not install backup systems or suspend hazardous operations during outages, the injury may support a third-party claim against the facility operator or equipment manufacturer.
A patient’s refrigerated medication — insulin, certain biologics, controlled-temperature pharmaceuticals — spoils during an extended outage, and the person who depends on it suffers a medical crisis. If a care facility was responsible for maintaining temperature-controlled storage and failed to do so, that failure is the case.
Each of these scenarios shares a common structure: the outage created the conditions, but a person or entity with a duty to protect the injured party failed to meet that duty, and the failure caused the harm. That is what a personal injury case looks like in the context of a power outage.
Texas Law on Utility Liability and Comparative Fault
Texas tort law governs events in Midland, Odessa, and Andrews, all within the Permian Basin. The framework that applies to any injury claim arising from a power outage includes several load-bearing principles.
Texas applies a modified comparative negligence standard with a 51% bar. In plain English: if you were partly at fault for your own injury, your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault — and if you were 51% or more at fault, you cannot recover at all. This matters in outage cases because the defense will try to pin fault on the injured person: you should have had a generator, you should not have used the one you had indoors, you should have checked on your own mother in the nursing home. Every percentage point they assign to you is money off their bill, which is exactly why they fight for every point.
Texas applies a modified comparative negligence standard with a 51% bar — your own share of fault reduces your recovery, and if you reach 51% fault or more, you are barred from recovering entirely.
The Texas wrongful death statute and survival statute govern fatal claims. If someone died because a facility failed to protect them during an outage — a nursing home resident who overheated, a patient whose medical device failed — the family’s claim runs through these statutes. Texas is also one of the few states where a jury may compensate the value of your loved one’s life itself, not just the paychecks that stopped. The insurance company’s lawyers know that case by heart. Now you do too.
For the statute of limitations: Texas generally gives you two years from the date of the injury to file a personal injury or wrongful death lawsuit. This is the state’s general personal injury deadline, and missing it kills the case no matter how strong it is. But there are critical exceptions and complications. If the defendant is a government entity — a municipal utility, a publicly-owned facility — the Texas Tort Claims Act imposes notice requirements and deadlines that can be far shorter than two years. If the injured person was a minor, the clock may toll. And in cases involving latent injury — say, a child who suffered lead exposure or a resident whose bedsore developed over weeks of post-outage neglect — the discovery rule may push the start date to when the injury was discovered, not when the outage occurred. The safe move is never to calculate your own deadline from a webpage. The safe move is to call.
The Regulatory Framework: PUC of Texas and ERCOT
Electric utility reliability and outage reporting in Texas fall under the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT reliability standards. Oncor, as a regulated transmission and distribution utility, must report outage data and comply with vegetation management, infrastructure maintenance, and grid-reliability requirements. These are not optional guidelines — they are regulatory duties, and a pattern of violating them can become evidence of negligence in a civil case.
The relationship between these regulatory requirements and a personal injury claim is important to understand. A PUC violation is not, by itself, a private cause of action. Texas does not let you sue a utility simply because it violated a regulation. But the violation can serve as evidence of the standard of care — proof that the utility knew what it was supposed to do and did not do it. In a case where the utility’s own maintenance failures caused or prolonged an outage that led to injury, the regulatory record becomes the backbone of the negligence argument.
No federal personal-injury regulatory regime — not FMCSA, not OSHA, not FELA, not the Jones Act, not CMS, not FDA — is directly implicated by a utility outage. But if the outage caused a workplace injury, OSHA standards may apply to the employer’s duty to protect workers during power failures. If the outage harmed a nursing home resident, CMS Conditions of Participation — including the federal requirement for emergency and standby power systems in Medicare-certified facilities — become directly relevant to the facility’s liability.
Who Can Be Liable When the Power Goes Out
The utility is the obvious first suspect, but the utility is often not the right defendant — or not the only one. Identifying every entity whose duty was breached is the work that decides whether a case has value.
The utility (Oncor or the local provider): A transmission and distribution utility can be liable if its own negligence — failed maintenance, ignored vegetation management, inadequate equipment inspections — caused or prolonged an outage that led to foreseeable injury. The bar is high: you must prove the utility’s conduct fell below the standard of care and that the specific injury was foreseeable. Routine outages from weather or equipment failure, without evidence of neglect, generally do not clear this bar. But a pattern of ignored maintenance, documented complaints, or prior similar outages can.
The nursing home or care facility: This is where outage-related injury cases often live. A nursing home that loses power and fails to protect its residents may be liable on multiple theories: negligence in failing to maintain emergency power, premises liability for dangerous conditions created by the outage, and violation of federal CMS requirements for emergency preparedness. The facility’s duty does not stop when the power goes out — if anything, it intensifies, because the residents are among the most vulnerable people in the community. If a facility knew its generator was non-functional, or had no plan for climate-control failure, or failed to monitor residents during an outage, those failures are the case.
The landlord or property manager: Residential landlords have duties to maintain habitable premises, which in Texas includes certain obligations regarding working utilities and safety systems. If a landlord failed to install required carbon monoxide detectors, failed to maintain heating equipment that could serve as backup during an outage, or ignored known electrical hazards that contributed to the outage, the landlord may share liability for resulting injuries.
The employer or facility operator: If a worker was injured because an employer continued hazardous operations during a power outage — running equipment without proper lighting, continuing processes that require ventilation or safety interlocks that lost power — the employer’s conduct is a potential third-party claim (if the employer is not the direct employer) or a non-subscriber claim (if the employer does not carry workers’ compensation). Texas is unique in allowing employers to opt out of workers’ comp, which opens a door to full tort claims against negligent employers.
The equipment manufacturer: If a backup generator failed, a CO detector did not sound, or a medical device malfunctioned during the power transition, product liability theories may reach the manufacturer. A generator that produces dangerous CO levels without adequate warnings, a detector with a known false-negative rate, or a medical device with a battery that drains faster than advertised — each of these can be a separate product case layered on top of the outage injury.
The Downstream Injuries That Turn Outages Into Cases
Understanding the medicine is what separates a real case from a complaint. These are the injury patterns we see when the power goes out and someone gets hurt.
Carbon monoxide poisoning from portable generators: This is the most common and most lethal outage-related injury. When the power goes out, people reach for generators. When generators run in enclosed or semi-enclosed spaces — a garage, a porch, a carport — carbon monoxide builds to lethal levels in minutes. CO is colorless, odorless, and heavier than air in some conditions; it displaces oxygen in the bloodstream, causing hypoxic injury to the brain and heart. The first symptoms are headache, dizziness, nausea — easily dismissed as flu. By the time someone loses consciousness, the damage may already be irreversible. Severe CO poisoning causes brain injury that looks, on neuropsychological testing, like a traumatic brain injury: memory loss, executive dysfunction, personality change. The proof lives in the carboxyhemoglobin blood test drawn at the hospital — the level of CO bound to the patient’s hemoglobin — and in the MRI changes that appear in the basal ganglia and white matter in serious cases. If you or someone you love was hospitalized for CO poisoning during a power outage, the questions are whether the generator’s warnings were adequate, whether the property had working CO detectors, and whether anyone with a duty to protect knew the risk and did nothing. Brain injuries from CO poisoning can carry lifetime costs in the millions — and the defense will fight hard to attribute the cognitive deficits to pre-existing conditions rather than the exposure.
Medical device failure: Oxygen concentrators, home dialysis machines, ventilators, infusion pumps, and refrigerated medications all depend on continuous power. When the power stops, the clock starts. A COPD patient on supplemental oxygen has minutes to hours before hypoxia sets in. A diabetic’s insulin loses potency after hours at room temperature. A dialysis patient who misses a treatment faces electrolyte crisis. If a care facility was responsible for maintaining these devices and their power supply, the failure to plan is the negligence — and the medical records documenting the resulting crisis are the proof.
Climate-control failure in care facilities: West Texas heat is lethal. When a nursing home loses air conditioning and does not evacuate or cool its residents, the elderly and infirm are the first to suffer. Heat stroke in an elderly resident can cause multi-organ failure, brain injury, and death — and it can happen faster than most people realize, because many older adults do not feel thirst or heat the way younger people do. The records that matter are the facility’s temperature logs, the staffing assignments during the outage, the generator maintenance records, and the emergency plan that was supposed to prevent exactly this. If the facility had no plan, or had a plan it did not follow, the gap between what it promised and what it did is the case.
Slip-and-fall injuries during outages: Loss of lighting creates fall hazards, particularly for elderly residents in facilities that failed to provide emergency lighting. A hip fracture in an 80-year-old is a life-changing injury — one that the defense will try to blame on the resident’s own carelessness, not the facility’s failure to light the hallway. If you need to understand how these premises cases work, our guide on what to do if you slip and fall in Walmart walks through the same notice and duty principles that apply to any commercial premises, including care facilities.
Evidence Preservation in Utility Outage Cases
Every outage injury case lives or dies on evidence that has a short and legally recognized shelf life. The records that prove what happened, who knew what, and what they did or did not do — those records are being created right now, and some of them are already on a clock to destruction.
The utility’s outage logs and system data: Oncor maintains outage records, system event logs, and restoration timelines. These show when the outage started, what caused it, how long it lasted, and what the utility did in response. These records are not permanent — they exist on the utility’s own retention schedule, and obtaining them typically requires a formal request or, in litigation, a subpoena. The preservation letter that freezes these records should go out early.
Weather data: National Weather Service records, local meteorological data, and ERCOT grid-stress data from the outage period establish whether the event was foreseeable and whether the utility or facility should have prepared. This data is generally available and durable, but it should be pulled and timestamped while it is easy to find.
Facility records (nursing homes, care facilities, workplaces): If the injury happened in a facility, the critical records include: the facility’s emergency power system maintenance records and generator testing logs; the facility’s emergency preparedness plan (which CMS requires and which must be updated annually); staffing assignment sheets from the outage period; temperature logs; incident reports; and resident care records. Each of these can vanish on the facility’s own retention schedule — and some, like daily staffing postings, can be legally discarded in as little as 18 months under federal regulation. The preservation demand that names each of these records by name is the first move.
Medical records: The hospital records from the injury — the carboxyhemoglobin level in a CO case, the temperature and vitals in a heat stroke case, the imaging in a fall case — are the proof of harm. These are generally retained for years under state and federal law, but the quality and completeness of early documentation is always better than reconstruction. The first blood draw, the first imaging study, the first nursing note — those are the records that carry the most weight.
The physical evidence: The generator. The CO detector. The medical device. The failed equipment. These items are the single most powerful proof in a product liability or negligence case, and they are the most easily lost. A generator gets thrown away after the family returns home. A CO detector gets replaced and the old one discarded. A medical device gets “serviced” and its memory wiped. The letter that says “do not alter, discard, or service this equipment — it is evidence in a potential claim” is the letter that saves the case. If you still have the equipment, keep it. If you do not, tell us what it was and we will work backward.
Surveillance footage: If the injury occurred in a facility, business, or common area with cameras, the footage that shows what actually happened during the outage — who responded, how fast, whether staff checked on residents — is typically overwritten on a rolling loop, often within 30 days. The preservation letter that freezes that footage is the most time-critical step in the first week.
The Insurance Adjuster’s Playbook in Outage Cases
If you or a family member was injured during a power outage, you may hear from an insurance adjuster — for the facility, the utility, the landlord, or the property manager — faster than you expect. Here is what they will do, and what to do about it.
Play 1: “It was an act of God.” The adjuster will frame the outage as an unavoidable natural event — weather, equipment failure, an act of God — and argue that no one is responsible. The counter: an act of God defense fails when the harm was foreseeable and a defendant’s failure to prepare made it worse. A nursing home in West Texas that has no working generator during a power outage cannot call the heat an act of God when the facility was required by federal regulation to have emergency power. A landlord who removed CO detectors cannot call CO poisoning an act of God when the danger was known and the protection was legally required.
Play 2: The recorded statement. A friendly voice will call to “check on you” and ask you to describe what happened “just for our records.” The call is recorded. Everything you say will be transcribed and searched for anything that can be used to reduce or deny your claim. The counter: do not give a recorded statement without your own lawyer present. You are not required to. Saying “I’m not ready to give a statement yet, I need to talk to an attorney first” is not an admission — it is a right.
Play 3: The fast settlement check. A check may arrive quickly, sometimes before you know the full extent of the injury, with a release form attached. The release, once signed, extinguishes your right to seek more — even if the injury turns out to be far worse than anyone expected. The counter: never sign a release from an insurance company without having it reviewed. A check that arrives before the medical results is not generosity. It is a strategy designed to close the file before the real cost is known. If your loved one’s CO exposure caused a brain injury that will affect them for decades, a quick $5,000 check and a signed release is the worst trade you will ever be offered. Our insurance claim lawyers know this playbook from the inside.
Play 4: “You were partly at fault.” In Texas, the adjuster will work to pin percentage points of fault on you — you should have had a generator, you should have known not to run it inside, you should have checked on your mother sooner. Every point is money. The counter: the duty to protect vulnerable people during an outage runs to the facility, the utility, and the property owner — not solely to the injured person or their family. Texas comparative fault reduces recovery but does not automatically erase it, and a skilled attorney fights to keep the defense’s allocation as low as possible.
Play 5: Delay. The adjuster may be polite, responsive, and perpetually “gathering more information” — right up until the statute of limitations expires. The counter: know your deadline. In Texas, the general personal injury statute of limitations is two years from the date of injury, but government-entity notice requirements can be far shorter. Do not let the adjuster’s courtesy lull you past a deadline that cannot be extended.
Case Value: What an Outage-Related Injury Is Worth
We will not pretend to value a case we have not seen. The reported outage affecting 32 customers across three Permian Basin cities, with no identified injury, has no personal injury value. That is the honest answer for the event as reported.
But if you were harmed during a power outage — if your mother overheated in a nursing home that had no backup cooling, if your child was poisoned by carbon monoxide from a generator with inadequate warnings, if your spouse was injured in a workplace that should have suspended operations — the value of your case depends on factors that only a full review can assess:
Economic damages: Past and future medical bills, lost wages, lost earning capacity, the cost of a life-care plan if the injury is catastrophic, household services the injured person can no longer perform. A severe CO poisoning brain injury can require lifetime care costing millions. A nursing home heat-stroke death carries the full economic loss of the victim’s remaining working years and the cost of the medical intervention that failed to save them.
Non-economic damages: Pain and suffering, mental anguish, loss of consortium, disfigurement, the life the injured person no longer gets to live. Texas does not cap non-economic damages in most personal injury cases, though medical malpractice claims against healthcare providers carry statutory caps that may apply if the injury occurred in a medical facility.
Punitive damages: If the defendant’s conduct was grossly negligent — a nursing home that knew its generator was broken and did nothing, a utility that ignored years of maintenance complaints, a landlord who removed safety equipment to save money — Texas law allows punitive damages. These are not automatic and require a higher burden of proof, but they are the reason some cases settle for multiples of what the medical bills alone would suggest.
Wrongful death damages: If someone died, Texas allows recovery for the family’s economic losses, the loss of the deceased’s companionship and society, and — in one of the strongest provisions in the country — the value of the life itself, separate from the wages it would have earned. Our wrongful death claim lawyers can walk you through how this works.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. The only honest way to value your case is to sit down with the medical records, the incident facts, and an attorney who knows how to build the number.
The First 72 Hours After an Outage-Related Injury
If someone was harmed during a power outage, the first 72 hours matter — not because the law requires you to act that fast, but because the evidence does.
Medical care first. If you have not been seen by a doctor, go. CO poisoning can cause brain injury even when the initial symptoms seem mild. Heat stroke can cause kidney and liver damage that does not show up for days. A fall that seemed minor can reveal a fracture or a brain bleed on imaging done 24 hours later. The medical record is not just treatment — it is the proof that the injury happened and that it was connected to the outage. Tell the doctor exactly what happened: the power went out, the generator was running, the facility had no cooling, the device stopped working. The chart entry that connects the injury to the event is made at the first visit, and it is the hardest thing to reconstruct later.
Document everything. Photograph the scene. Photograph the generator. Photograph the CO detector (or its absence). Photograph the facility conditions — the dark hallways, the non-functioning emergency lights, the temperature readings if available. Save every text message, every email, every notice from the utility or the facility. Write down the names of everyone who was there and everyone who responded. Memory degrades fast; a contemporaneous notebook does not.
Do not sign anything from an insurance company. We have covered this above. The release that arrives in the first week is designed to close your case before you know what it is worth.
Do not give a recorded statement. You can report the facts of what happened to the appropriate authorities. You can cooperate with any official investigation. You do not have to let an insurance adjuster record a conversation that will be mined for material to reduce your claim.
Preserve the physical evidence. Do not discard the generator. Do not “service” the medical device. Do not throw away the CO detector. If the equipment is evidence, it stays evidence. If it has already been discarded, document what it was, where it was purchased, and when it was last used.
Call a lawyer. The preservation letter that freezes the utility’s outage logs, the facility’s generator records, and the surveillance footage goes out the day you call. The statute of limitations clock is already running. The evidence is already aging. The consultation is free, and the call costs nothing.
How Fees Work
We work on contingency. That means we do not get paid unless we win your case. The fee is 33.33% of the recovery before trial and 40% if the case goes to trial. You pay nothing out of pocket — no hourly billing, no retainer, no upfront cost. The consultation is free. The first conversation costs you nothing and may be the most valuable hour you spend on this entire situation. If we are not the right fit for your case, we will tell you. If your case does not have merit, we will tell you that too — because our reputation depends on honesty, and yours depends on not being led into a case that cannot be won.
Why This Firm
Ralph Manginello has spent 27+ years in courtrooms, including federal court, as the Managing Partner of Attorney911. Licensed in Texas since November 6, 1998, he built this firm on the principle that the people who need a lawyer the most are usually the ones who can least afford to make a mistake choosing one. He was a journalist before he was a lawyer — which means he learned to find the facts first and the argument second. Every case that comes through this door gets the same treatment: the evidence gets frozen, the records get pulled, the medicine gets understood, and the number gets built from the ground up. You can learn more about Ralph Manginello here.
Lupe Peña is a former insurance-defense attorney. He spent years inside a national defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue people exactly like you. He knows how claims are priced, how reserves are set, how IME doctors are selected, and how surveillance works. He knows because he used to do it. Now he uses that knowledge for injured clients. He is fluent in Spanish and conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter — because the Permian Basin is a bilingual community, and your family deserves to understand every word of what is happening with your case in the language you actually think in. You can learn more about Lupe Peña here.
Together, we have recovered $50,000,000+ for our clients. That is a firm marketing figure, not a promise about your case — every case is different, and past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. But the number tells you something about the level of fight we bring. If your family was harmed during a power outage because someone with a duty to protect them failed, we are the firm that goes to find that failure and make it answer. You can see our full range of practice areas here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue the power company just because my electricity went out?
No — not in Texas, and not in any state we are aware of. A power outage, standing alone, is a service interruption, not a tort. To have a personal injury case, you need an injury caused by someone’s breach of duty. The outage itself does not create that breach. But if the utility’s own negligence — ignored maintenance, deferred inspections, a pattern of known defects — caused or prolonged an outage that led to a foreseeable injury, the utility may be liable. The distinction is between “the power went out” (no case) and “the power went out because the utility ignored a known defect, and someone was hurt as a result” (potential case).
My mother was in a nursing home that lost power and she got sick. Is that a case?
It may be. Nursing homes that accept Medicare and Medicaid are subject to federal requirements for emergency preparedness, including emergency and standby power systems. If the facility lost power and failed to protect residents — no working generator, no cooling plan, no monitoring of vulnerable residents, no evacuation plan — those failures can constitute negligence. The case is not against the utility for the outage; it is against the facility for its failure to protect your mother when the outage happened. The records that matter are the generator maintenance logs, the emergency plan, the staffing assignments, and the temperature and care records from the outage period.
Someone in my family got carbon monoxide poisoning from a generator during the outage. Who is responsible?
Potentially several parties. If the generator’s warnings were inadequate — the manufacturer may be liable for product liability failure to warn. If the property lacked required CO detectors — the landlord or property manager may be liable. If a facility was responsible for the person’s safety and failed to prevent generator use in an unsafe location — the facility may be liable. The CO poisoning itself is proven by the carboxyhemoglobin blood test and the medical records from the hospital visit. The question of who is responsible requires a full review of the facts, the equipment, the property, and the warnings.
How long do I have to file a lawsuit for an injury that happened during a power outage?
In Texas, the general statute of limitations for personal injury is two years from the date of the injury. For wrongful death, it is two years from the date of death. But there are critical exceptions: if the defendant is a government entity (such as a municipal utility), the Texas Tort Claims Act may require notice within a much shorter period — sometimes as little as six months. If the injured person was a minor, the deadline may be extended. If the injury was not immediately discoverable, the discovery rule may push the start date forward. Do not calculate your own deadline from a website. Call us, and we will tell you exactly how much time you have.
The insurance company already offered me a settlement. Should I take it?
Almost never in the first week or the first month. The first offer is designed to close the file before you know the full extent of the injury. CO poisoning can cause brain injury that does not fully declare itself for weeks. Heat stroke can cause organ damage that progresses over days. A fracture can reveal a brain bleed on follow-up imaging. If you sign a release, you give up the right to seek more — no matter what the medical reality turns out to be. Have any settlement offer reviewed by an attorney before you sign anything. The consultation is free. The cost of signing the wrong release is forever.
I was injured at work during a power outage. Can I sue my employer?
It depends on whether your employer carries workers’ compensation. If they do, workers’ comp is generally your exclusive remedy against the employer — but you may have a third-party claim against another entity (a facility operator, an equipment manufacturer, a contractor). If your employer does not carry workers’ comp — and in Texas, they are not required to — you can bring a full tort claim directly against the employer for negligence. This is one of the unique features of Texas law, and it is why understanding your employer’s coverage status is one of the first things we check. Our workplace accident lawyers can help you figure out which path applies.
The power was only out for a few hours. Is that long enough to cause a real injury?
Yes, depending on the vulnerability of the person and the conditions. A COPD patient on supplemental oxygen can suffer hypoxic brain injury within hours of losing power to their concentrator. An elderly nursing home resident in 100-degree West Texas heat can develop heat stroke within hours if cooling fails. Carbon monoxide from a generator can reach lethal levels in minutes in an enclosed space. The duration of the outage is relevant to foreseeability — a 30-minute blink is different from a 12-hour blackout — but the severity of the injury is driven by the vulnerability of the person and the failure of whoever had a duty to protect them, not just the length of the outage.
How much does it cost to talk to you?
Nothing. The consultation is free. The call is free. You can reach us at 1-888-ATTY-911, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You will speak to a live person, not an answering service. If we take your case, you pay nothing upfront and nothing unless we win. We work on contingency — 33.33% before trial, 40% if the case goes to trial. If we do not recover money for you, you owe us no fee. That is not a promise about your outcome; it is a promise about how we get paid. The only risk in calling is spending thirty minutes learning whether you have a case. The risk in not calling is letting the evidence disappear and the deadline pass while you decide.
Get Help Now
If you or someone you love was injured during a power outage in Midland, Odessa, Andrews, or anywhere in the Permian Basin, the evidence is aging and the clock is running. The utility’s outage logs are on a retention schedule. The facility’s generator records are on a shorter one. The surveillance footage may already be recording over itself. The medical records that connect your injury to the event are being created right now, at the hospital, in the chart that the doctor is still writing.
You do not have to know whether you have a case before you call. That is our job. Your job is to get medical care, save the evidence, and make the call. We will handle the rest — the preservation letters, the records demands, the regulatory record pulls, the medical analysis, the insurance negotiations, and, if it comes to it, the courtroom.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911. Free consultation. No fee unless we win. Hablamos Español.
The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC — Attorney911. Legal Emergency Lawyers. Serving Texas from offices in Houston, Austin, and Beaumont. 27+ years of fighting for injured Texans. $50,000,000+ recovered.
This page is legal information, not legal advice. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. Contacting the firm is free and confidential. You are not represented by an attorney until a written engagement agreement is signed.