24/7 LIVE STAFF — Compassionate help, any time day or night
CALL NOW 1-888-ATTY-911
Legal Resources

Blog

Legal insights, case updates, and resources from our Houston attorneys.

28658 Articles

Texas Hydrogen Sulfide Exposure & Toxic Tort Attorneys: Attorney911 Holds the Well Operators and Corporate Parents Behind High-H2S Wells in the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford Shale, Where 78,000 Residents and 33,600 Students Live Within a Half-Mile of Gas at Concentrations Classified Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health, H2S That Deadens the Olfactory Nerve So Victims Cannot Smell the Lethal Gas Around Them, Chronic Exposure Linked to Neurological Damage, Asthma and Rashes, We Pull the Wellhead Monitoring Data, RRC Well Files and TCEQ Air-Quality Logs Before Operators Revise or Destroy Them, Lupe Peña the Former Insurance-Defense Attorney Who Knows How Oil-Company Claims Teams Value and Deny These Cases, Ralph Manginello’s 27+ Years of Federal-Court Trial Practice, Strict Liability for Abnormally Dangerous Activities and Private Nuisance Law, the Firm Has Recovered $50M+ for Injury Victims — Free 24/7 Consultation, No Fee Unless We Win, Hablamos Español, 1-888-ATTY-911

The Gas That Killed on Screen Is in Your Air Right Now If you live in the Permian Basin or the Eagle Ford Shale, you may have watched the hydrogen sulfide scene in Landman and felt something cold settle into your chest — not because the show was frightening, but because your body already knows that smell. The rotten-egg odor that comes and goes with the wind. The headaches that hit the whole household on the same afternoon. The child whose asthma started the year the new well went in a quarter mile from the school. You may have told yourself it was allergies, the weather, the dust. A 2024 investigation by journalists and public-health researchers found that roughly 78,000 people lived within a half-mile of Texas wells containing hydrogen sulfide at concentrations classified as “immediately dangerous to life and health” — and at least 33,600 students attended schools inside that same footprint. Those numbers are not from a television script. They are from documented well data, mapping, and census records, and they describe a threat that is still in the air around homes, playgrounds, and classrooms across two of the busiest oil and gas plays in the world. We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We handle toxic tort and environmental exposure cases in Texas, and we built this page for the family sitting at the kitchen table at 2 a.m. with a folder of doctor visits and a suspicion that nobody in authority has been straight…

Hydrogen Sulfide Toxic Tort & Environmental Exposure Attorneys for Texas Families Near Oil and Gas Wells: Attorney911 Pursues the Operators Behind Leaking Wells and Storage Tanks That Released Recurring H2S Emissions, Even Sickening State Inspectors Who Evacuated at Toxic Levels Outside People’s Homes, Chronic Headaches, Nausea, Rashes and Respiratory Illness From Low-Level Gas Exposure, We Secure the TCEQ Air-Monitoring Data and Railroad Commission Inspection Records Before They Are Purged, Ralph Manginello’s 27+ Years of Federal-Court Trial Practice, Lupe Peña the Former Insurance-Defense Insider Who Knows How the Claims Machine Values and Denies Environmental Cases, Texas Toxic Trespass and Private Nuisance Doctrine, Gross Negligence for Repeated Citations and Temporary Repairs With Conscious Indifference to Families and Children, the Firm Has Recovered $50M+ for Injury Victims — Free 24/7 Consultation, No Fee Unless We Win, Hablamos Español, 1-888-ATTY-911

Hydrogen Sulfide Exposure from Oil and Gas Operations — Legal Rights for Texas Residents You know the smell. Rotten eggs. It comes and goes — stronger some mornings, fainter others, sometimes gone entirely for a week before it returns and wakes you out of a dead sleep. You have probably stopped mentioning it to your neighbors because they smell it too, and nobody knows what to do about it. The headaches you have been carrying for months, the nausea that hits your kids at the kitchen table, the cough that started the year the new well went in half a mile down the road — you have a feeling these things are connected. You are right to have that feeling, and the investigation that confirmed what you suspected is the reason this page exists. We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We handle toxic tort and environmental exposure cases in Texas. This page is for one person: you, sitting in your house in Karnes County or DeWitt County or Reeves County or Midland, Googling “hydrogen sulfide” at 2 a.m. because your child woke up coughing again and the smell is in the walls. What follows is everything we know about what this gas does to a body, what the law says about a company that pumps it into your neighborhood, what the evidence looks like, where it is hiding, how fast it is disappearing, and what a case is worth. Nothing here is a guess. It is the…

Hydrogen Sulfide Exposure from the Orphaned Well Blowout in Toyah, Reeves County, Texas — Attorney911 Pursues Kinder Morgan and the Corporate Chain Behind 19 Days of Uncontrolled Toxic Gas Over a Town of 61, Ralph Manginello’s 27+ Years of Federal-Court Trial Practice, We Secure the TCEQ Air-Monitoring Records and Produced-Water Samples Before the Contaminants Disperse, Texas Nuisance and Strict-Liability Doctrine for Ultrahazardous Well Operations, Lupe Peña the Former Insurance-Defense Insider Who Knows How the Claims Machine Denies Exposure Cases When Handheld Sensors Miss Nighttime H2S Peaks, the Firm Has Recovered $50M+ for Injury Victims, the Statute of Limitations Is Running — Free 24/7 Consultation, No Fee Unless We Win, Hablamos Español, 1-888-ATTY-911

Toyah, Texas Oil Well Blowout: Your Rights After 19 Days of Toxic Exposure For nineteen days, the air in Toyah smelled like rotten eggs. You know this — you lived it. You turned on the air conditioner to dampen the stench because the alternative was breathing it straight. You wore a disposable mask to sleep. You watched a column of chemical-laden water shoot over a hundred feet into the West Texas sky from a well five miles west of your town, and when the state’s environmental agency finally came to check the air, they told you what their sensors read: nothing. No detections. Clean air. Go home. A former member of your own city council went to the hospital with dizziness from the smell. The doctor cleared her and told her to come back if things got worse. She slept in a mask. Another resident filed a complaint with the state and never heard back. The investigators came during the day — but you and your neighbors know the stench was worst at night, when the desert air cooled and settled and the gas pooled in the low places around your homes. Nobody sampled the air at 2 a.m. Nobody measured what you were breathing in your sleep. We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm. We handle toxic exposure and industrial incident cases across Texas. Ralph Manginello has spent 27-plus years in courtrooms, including federal court, and before he was a lawyer he was a journalist — which means…

Oilfield Fire & Wrongful Death at a Midland County Salt Water Disposal Facility: Attorney911 Pursues On Point Oilfield Operations and the Crude-Hauling Carriers Behind Oil-Laden 18-Wheeler Fires — Daniel Calvillo Killed at the Scene, Aaron Montanez Airlifted with Severe Burns to a Lubbock Trauma Center, Ralph Manginello’s 27+ Years of Federal-Court Trial Practice, We Secure the Fire-Cause and Origin Reports, ELD Telematics and Grounding-System Schematics Before Post-Fire Remediation Destroys the Scene, Lupe Peña the Former Insurance-Defense Insider Who Knows How the Claims Machine Values and Denies Oilfield Burn Cases, Texas Non-Subscriber Employer Liability Strips the Facility Operator of Its Common-Law Defenses, OSHA Fatality Investigation and Railroad Commission Jurisdiction, the Firm Has Recovered Millions in Wrongful-Death Cases and $50M+ Total for Injury Victims — Free 24/7 Consultation, No Fee Unless We Win, Hablamos Español, 1-888-ATTY-911

Midland County Oilfield Fire: What Happened at On Point Oilfield Operations and What It Means for Your Family If you are reading this because someone you love was hurt or killed in an oilfield fire in the Permian Basin, you are probably sitting in a hospital waiting room in Lubbock or Midland, or at a kitchen table with a funeral home’s card in your hand, and you are being told things by an insurance adjuster that sound reasonable and are not. We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm — and this page is not a sales pitch. It is the analysis we would give you if you were sitting across from us right now, written so you can arm yourself before you talk to anyone from the company or its insurer. On January 15, 2019, a fire erupted at a distillation facility operated by On Point Oilfield Operations on FM 1788 near Interstate 20 in Midland County, Texas. Two 18-wheelers hauling oil caught fire at the salt water disposal site. One worker — Daniel Calvillo — died at the scene, burned severely. Another — Aaron Montanez — suffered catastrophic burn injuries that required emergency transport to Midland Memorial Hospital and then an emergency air-ambulance flight to a burn treatment facility in Lubbock. A third person who was inside the building escaped without physical injury. The Midland County Fire Marshal, Dale Little, reported that approximately 25 emergency responders from several departments arrived to find two truck drivers and an employee…

Permian Basin Oilfield Wrongful Death in Midland County, TX: Attorney911 Pursues the Well Site Operators, Drilling Contractors, Service Companies and Equipment Manufacturers Behind the Multi-Employer Pad Sites Where Heavy Machinery and High-Pressure Systems Turn Fatal, Ralph Manginello’s 27+ Years of Federal-Court Trial Practice, Lupe Peña the Former Insurance-Defense Insider Who Knows How the Claims Machine Values and Denies Oilfield Death Cases, We Move to Preserve the OSHA Fatality File, Well-Site Equipment and Co-Worker Statements Before the Basin’s Transient Workforce Scatters and Physical Evidence Is Repaired or Scrapped, Texas Non-Subscriber Law Strips Employers Who Opt Out of Workers’ Comp of Every Common-Law Defense, the Firm Has Recovered Millions in Wrongful-Death Cases — Free 24/7 Consultation, No Fee Unless We Win, Hablamos Español, 1-888-ATTY-911

When Someone You Love Doesn’t Come Home From the Oilfield The call comes at a hour when nobody is ready for it. A supervisor’s voice, or a sheriff’s deputy, or a coworker who sounds like the words are coming from somewhere outside his body. There has been an accident on a site somewhere out past the FM roads that connect Midland to the leases. Your person is not coming home. Everything after that sentence is noise you will reconstruct later — who said what, what they promised, whether the company man seemed sorry or seemed like he was already building a version of events. We are writing this for you, and for the family at the kitchen table at two in the morning who is about to be contacted by people who sound sympathetic and are not. What happened in Midland County — the loss of one life on an oilfield site in the Permian Basin — is the kind of event that repeats itself in this country more than most people outside the basin will ever know. The machinery, the pressure, the chemicals, the schedules, the transient workforce, the multi-company worksite where everyone’s name is on a different truck — all of it kills, and it kills in patterns that are recognizable, preventable, and too often met with a company’s first instinct to control the story before the family can control the evidence. You need to hear three things before anything else. Workers’ compensation may not be your only…

Hydrogen Sulfide Toxic Exposure from Oil Well Venting in Luling, Caldwell County, Texas: Attorney911 Pursues the Well Operators Behind 300-Plus-PPM Sour Gas Released Next to Backyards and Driveways, We Secure the Wellhead Measurement Data and Railroad Commission H9 Records Before Operators Alter Venting Conditions, Ralph Manginello’s 27+ Years of Federal-Court Trial Practice, Lupe Peña the Former Insurance-Defense Insider Who Knows How the Claims Machine Values and Denies Community Exposure Cases, NIOSH Classifies 100 Parts Per Million as Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health While Railroad Commission Rule 36 Requires Operators to Report H2S and Restrict Public Access, Texas Private Nuisance and Trespass Doctrine for Toxic Gas Migrating Across Property Lines, Chronic Exposure Causes Headaches, Memory Loss, Insomnia and Respiratory Damage, the Firm Has Recovered $50M+ for Injury Victims — Free 24/7 Consultation, No Fee Unless We Win, Hablamos Español, 1-888-ATTY-911

Dangerous Hydrogen Sulfide Levels in Caldwell County Oil Wells — Your Legal Rights You have been smelling it for years. The whole town has. They even gave it a name — the “Luling effect” — that rotten-egg odor that rolls across Caldwell County from the old oil wells that have been here since Edgar B. Davis struck oil in 1922. You grew up with it. Your neighbors grew up with it. The city manager said it himself: “Just because it has a smell doesn’t mean it’s always bad. That’s part of being in the oilfields.” But now a peer-reviewed study, published in September 2024 by researchers from Texas State University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Maryland, has measured what that smell actually is — and the numbers are staggering. At thirteen of the forty-six wells the researchers tested, hydrogen sulfide concentrations hit 300 parts per million or higher. That was the maximum the measuring device could read — the real number could be higher. At eight more wells, readings exceeded 100 parts per million. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health classifies 100 ppm as immediately dangerous to life and health. At 500 ppm, a person collapses within five minutes. Above 700 ppm, the gas is lethal. This is not “part of being in the oilfields.” This is a preventable, documented, ongoing release of a lethal gas into the air your family breathes — and the companies that own these wells had a cheap remedy available…

Permian Basin Oil Field Injuries, Toxic Exposure & Wrongful Death: César Gómez’s Shattered Spine and Two-Week Coma From an Oil Field Truck Rollover on Ice After Sleepless Multi-Day Shifts, Diego García’s Leukemia From Radionuclide-Laden Drilling Waste, Marcos Carranza’s Loss of Smell, Vision and Memory to Hydrogen Sulfide — Attorney911 Pursues Deep-Pocket Operators Like ExxonMobil and the Lowest-Bid Contractor Shells Behind the New Mexico Boom, We Secure ELD Data, H2S Monitoring Logs, Waste Manifests and Shift Records Before They Vanish on a Transient Workforce, NMOSHA Confined-Space Standards and FMCSA Hours-of-Service Rules the Companies Ignored, New Mexico Workers’ Compensation Exclusive Remedy With Third-Party Claims Against Site-Controlling Operators and the Discovery Rule for Toxic Exposure, Ralph Manginello’s 27+ Years of Federal-Court Trial Practice, Lupe Peña the Former Insurance-Defense Insider, $50M+ Recovered Including $2.5M+ Truck-Crash and $5M+ TBI — Free 24/7 Consultation, No Fee Unless We Win, Hablamos Español, 1-888-ATTY-911

New Mexico Oil Field Injuries: The True Cost of Working the Permian Basin You are reading this at a time when everything has already gone wrong. Maybe you are the one who got hurt — the spinal injury that means you cannot lift your own child, the leukemia diagnosis that came out of nowhere at thirty-six, the loss of smell that means you will never again know the dinner your wife cooked. Maybe you are the spouse who keeps finding your husband’s work boots by the door even though he is not coming home the same. Maybe you are sitting in a hospital room in El Paso, two hours from home, wondering how a two-week coma turned into a lifetime of metal pegs in a spine. Or maybe you are the worker who is afraid — afraid that if you speak up, you lose your job, or worse, that someone calls immigration on the only livelihood that feeds your family. We are Attorney911. We are writing to you, not at you. Everything that follows is for the person who is trying to understand what happened to them or to someone they love in the oil fields of southeastern New Mexico — and what can still be done about it. We handle workplace accident cases and the catastrophic injuries that come from them, and we are going to tell you the truth about what the law allows, what the company is already doing to protect itself, and what the clock is…

Hydrogen Sulfide Gas Exposure & Toxic Tort Attorneys — Odessa, Texas Families Sickened by Oil-Field H2S at 90 Times the State Residential Limit: Attorney911 Pursues the Permian Basin Operators Behind the Leaking Storage Tanks, Unlit Flares and Corroded Hatches, Ralph Manginello’s 27+ Years of Federal-Court Trial Practice, We Secure the Air-Monitoring Data, Infrared Video and State Violation Records Before They Disappear as Operators Transfer Management, Chronic Exposure Linked to Neurological Damage and Two Deaths from Acute H2S, Lupe Peña the Former Insurance-Defense Insider Who Knows How the Claims Machine Values These Cases, Texas Private Nuisance, Trespass and Strict-Liability Claims for Families Exposed to a Gas the EPA Deregulated Decades Ago, the Firm Has Recovered Millions in Wrongful-Death and Catastrophic-Injury Cases — Free 24/7 Consultation, No Fee Unless We Win, Hablamos Español, 1-888-ATTY-911

If Your Family Is Breathing Hydrogen Sulfide from Oil Operations in Odessa, This Is What the Law Says — and What the Companies Hope You Never Find Out You wake up to the smell of rotten eggs. Your children have headaches again. Your toddler is nauseated. Across the street, a flare burns gas in a curling flame from a pipe jutting thirty-five feet into the West Texas sky, and behind it sit weathered 500-barrel tanks storing oil and water pumped from wells that have been here longer than most of the houses. You have called the state. You have filed complaints. An inspector came out, found the gas leaking from a damaged tank hatch or an unlit flare, wrote it up, and left. The company made a piecemeal repair. The gas kept leaking. That is not a failure of your persistence. It is a feature of a system designed to protect the operator’s economics, not your family’s lungs. What the state’s own monitoring equipment has documented outside homes in Odessa — in Ector County, in the heart of the Permian Basin — is not a close call. State air analysts were hit with hydrogen sulfide so concentrated inside their monitoring van that their hearts raced, their heads split, and they became nauseated. They fled. Their internal notes called the levels “insanely high.” One reading outside a family home reached 62 parts per million — stronger than the maximum level the Occupational Safety and Health Administration allows for oilfield workers who…

H2S Wrongful Death & Toxic-Exposure Attorneys: Jacob and Natalee Dean Killed by Hydrogen Sulfide at an Aghorn Facility in Odessa, Ector County, Attorney911 Pursues the Facility Operators and Corporate Parents Behind H2S-Lethal Permian Basin Sites Where Railroad Commission Rule 36 Should Have Prevented the Exposure, the Knockdown Gas That Drops a Worker in Seconds Then Claims the Untrained Person Who Enters After, Ralph Manginello’s 27+ Years of Federal-Court Trial Practice, Texas Gross-Negligence Law Breaks Through Workers’ Comp Exclusivity for Employee Deaths While Non-Employee Family Claims Proceed on Full Premises Liability, Lupe Peña the Former Insurance-Defense Insider, We Secure H2S Monitoring Data, CCTV and Training Records Before the Logs Auto-Purge in 30 to 90 Days, the Firm Has Recovered Millions in Wrongful-Death Cases — Free 24/7 Consultation, No Fee Unless We Win, Hablamos Español, 1-888-ATTY-911

H2S Deaths in the Odessa Oilfield: 50 Years After Denver City, Who Is Accountable? If you are reading this page, someone you love did not come home from the oilfield. Or they came home and told you what happened at that facility, and now you are sitting at a kitchen table in Odessa or Midland or Pecos at two in the morning, searching for answers because the company called it an accident and you know in your bones it was not. You are right. In the Permian Basin, hydrogen sulfide is not a mystery. It is a known, regulated, entirely foreseeable killer that the oil and gas industry has understood for over half a century. When a facility operator lets it take a life, that is not bad luck. That is a choice someone made between compliance and safety — and your family is living with the cost. We are the trial team at Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We handle wrongful death claims and toxic exposure cases in Texas, including the Permian Basin. Ralph Manginello has spent 27-plus years in courtrooms, including federal court, building cases against companies that chose shortcuts over lives. Lupe Peña sat inside a national insurance-defense firm before he joined this side of the table — he knows how adjusters and their lawyers value claims, how they set reserves in the first 48 hours, and how they engineer recorded statements designed to protect the company, not your family. We work on contingency. We…

Industrial Explosion & Mass-Casualty Wrongful Death in West, McLennan County, Texas: The Ammonium Nitrate Detonation at the West Fertilizer Company That Killed 15 Including 10 Volunteer Firefighters and Injured Hundreds — Attorney911 Pursues the Facility Operators and Chemical Suppliers Behind 40-60 Tons of Detonable Oxidizer Stored Without Sprinklers or NFPA 400 Compliance in a Wood-Frame Building Adjacent to Homes, Schools and a Nursing Home, Ralph Manginello’s 27+ Years of Federal-Court Trial Practice, Avvo-Rated Excellent, We Secure the CSB Findings, ATF Origin-and-Cause Records, EPA Tier II Filings and OSHA Process-Safety Documentation Before Corporate Entities Dissolve and Insurance Policies Lapse, Lupe Peña the Former Insurance-Defense Insider Who Knows How the Claims Machine Values Mass-Casualty Industrial Claims, Texas Gross Negligence Doctrine and Strict Liability for Abnormally Dangerous Activities, the Firm Has Recovered $50M+ Total and Millions in Wrongful-Death Cases — Free 24/7 Consultation, No Fee Unless We Win, Hablamos Español, 1-888-ATTY-911

West, Texas Fertilizer Plant Explosion: Your Legal Rights After an Industrial Disaster If you lost someone in the West Fertilizer Company explosion, or if you were injured when the blast tore through your home, your school, or your town on April 17, 2013, you already know what happened. You felt it. What you may not know is that the people who stored forty to sixty tons of a detonable chemical in a wooden building with no sprinklers, next to homes and a nursing home and a school, had options they chose not to take — and the law in Texas holds that kind of choice accountable. We are Attorney911, The Manginello Law Firm, and this page is for the families of West, McLennan County, Texas who are trying to understand what rights they still have after one of the worst industrial disasters in Texas history. Fifteen people died. Ten of them were firefighters — volunteers who ran toward a fire they were never warned was sitting on top of a bomb. Hundreds were injured. A hundred million dollars in property damage spread across twenty-five city blocks. A ninety-foot crater where a building used to stand. And the official investigation said plainly that the firefighters did not fail — the system that was supposed to protect them did. That system was designed and operated by a company that chose to store bulk ammonium nitrate in an unprotected wood-frame structure, with no fire suppression, no prefire plan shared with responders, and no…

Need Legal Help Today?

Free consultation. No upfront costs. We don't get paid unless we win your case.

Call 1-888-ATTY-911