Artesia Refinery Explosion: What Happened at HF Sinclair’s Navajo Refinery on October 31, 2025, and What Your Rights Are Now
If you were inside the Navajo Refinery on October 31, 2025, when the unit let go and the fire rolled through, you already know more about what an industrial explosion does to a human body than any lawyer can tell you. You felt the pressure wave before you heard the sound. You smelled the hydrocarbons before you saw the flash. And if you are reading this from a hospital bed in Artesia, Carlsbad, or Roswell — or from a kitchen table where someone you love is not sitting anymore — you are in the hours and days that decide everything about what comes next. Not just medically. Legally.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We are a trial firm that handles refinery explosions, catastrophic industrial injuries, and toxic-exposure cases, and we are writing this for one person: you. The worker who was burned. The contractor who was thrown. The family member of someone who was not carried out. Or the parent in Artesia who watched thick black smoke settle over their children’s school the morning after Halloween and did not know whether it was safe to let them walk outside.
Here is the first thing you need to hear: what happened at the Navajo Refinery was not an act of God. A refinery is not a weather event. It is a facility that handles enormous quantities of flammable and toxic materials under extreme pressure and temperature, and the federal government wrote a fourteen-point safety rulebook specifically because it knows — has known for decades — that when those rules are not followed, people die and communities breathe poison. The explosion that injured three people and sent smoke over your city happened inside a regulatory framework that was designed to prevent exactly this. The question is not whether the rules existed. The question is whether they were followed.
This page is the complete legal-rights analysis of the Artesia refinery explosion — for the injured workers, for their families, and for the community of approximately 12,000 people who live in the shadow of a refinery that has operated for more than a century. We will tell you what the law gives you, what the insurance company is already doing to limit what you can recover, what evidence is disappearing right now, and what a case like this is actually worth. We do not get paid unless we win your case. The consultation is free. And we are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, at 1-888-ATTY-911.
If you were hurt in a refinery explosion — or someone you love was — we handle refinery accident cases with the depth this kind of catastrophe demands.
Who Was Hurt: The Three Injured Workers and the Community That Breathed the Smoke
Three people were injured in the October 31 explosion and fires at HF Sinclair’s Navajo Refinery in Artesia. Public reporting confirms the injuries and the release of thick smoke over the city, but does not yet describe the specific severity or type of each injured person’s harm. Based on what a refinery explosion does to the human body — and what we have seen in cases like this for decades — the three directly injured individuals may be facing any combination of the following:
Thermal burns. When hydrocarbons ignite, the fire is not like a flame on a stove. It is a flash fire or vapor-cloud explosion that can engulf a worker in seconds. Burns are measured by Total Body Surface Area — the percentage of skin affected — and by depth. A full-thickness burn, the kind that destroys skin all the way through, is the most dangerous kind, and the cruelest part is that it may hurt the least: the nerves that carry pain are destroyed along with the skin. Burn specialists publish a referral list that sends every chemical burn, every high-voltage electrical burn, every burn to the face or hands, and any burn covering more than ten percent of the body to a dedicated burn center. A serious burn can mean a month in a burn unit — roughly one hospital day for every percent of the body burned — followed by years of graft surgeries and scar management.
Blast and overpressure trauma. A vapor-cloud explosion generates a pressure wave that moves faster than sound. That wave does not have to throw you into a wall to injure you. Primary blast injury damages the lungs, the eardrums, and the gastrointestinal tract through pressure alone — the same force that collapses a building can rupture the air sacs in your lungs without breaking a single bone. Tertiary blast injury is what happens when the wave picks you up and throws you into a pipe rack, a concrete wall, or the ground — producing the fractures, head injuries, and internal organ damage that an automotive crash would produce, but with the added burden of burn injuries layered on top.
Inhalation injury. The smoke that settled over Artesia on October 31 was not ordinary smoke. Refinery smoke can carry hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, benzene, volatile organic compounds, and particulate matter — substances that burn the airway from the inside, poison the blood, and, in the case of benzene, cause blood cancers that may not appear for years or decades. Singed nasal hairs, soot in the mouth, a hoarse voice, or a cough that started the day of the explosion and never went away are clinical warning signs that the airway was involved — and airway injury kills hours later, not at the scene.
Orthopedic and neurological damage. Being thrown by a blast wave, struck by flying debris, or caught in a structural collapse produces fractures, spinal injuries, and traumatic brain injuries. A brain injury from a blast does not require a direct blow to the head — the pressure wave itself can cause diffuse axonal injury, the microscopic tearing of nerve fibers that leaves a CT scan looking normal while the person cannot remember their daughter’s name.
Beyond the three directly injured, the community of Artesia was exposed. The coalition of more than twenty environmental and health organizations that petitioned the New Mexico Environment Department on November 20, 2025, made the point plainly: existing air monitors in Carlsbad and Hobbs do not cover Artesia, leaving residents without real-time data on what was in the air they and their children breathed. If you are an Artesia resident who was exposed to the smoke — particularly if you have developed respiratory symptoms, persistent cough, headaches, or nausea since October 31 — you may have legal rights related to community toxic exposure that are separate and distinct from the rights of the workers who were inside the refinery.
HF Sinclair: The Company Behind the Navajo Refinery
HF Sinclair Corporation is a publicly traded refining, pipeline, and marketing company formed in 2022 through the merger of HollyFrontier Corporation and Sinclair Oil Corporation. The Navajo Refinery in Artesia is one of HF Sinclair’s flagship refining assets, with a crude oil processing capacity exceeding 100,000 barrels per day and an operational history spanning more than a century. The refinery is deeply embedded in Artesia’s geography and economy — it sits in the heart of the Permian Basin, processing crude from surrounding wells, and it has been a defining industrial presence in a town of approximately 12,000 people for generations.
What this means for your case is that HF Sinclair is a deep-pocket defendant. A publicly traded refiner of this scale maintains significant financial resources, corporate insurance coverage, and self-insured retention structures typical of major refining companies. The company operates multiple refineries across the western and south-central United States and is subject to extensive federal regulatory oversight — OSHA Process Safety Management, EPA Risk Management Program, and Department of Transportation pipeline safety regulations among them. When a company of this scale is responsible for an explosion that injures workers and contaminates a community’s air, the resources to satisfy a substantial judgment exist. The question is not whether the money is there. The question is whether you can prove what the company did wrong, and whether you act fast enough to preserve the evidence that proves it.
One of the first things we examine in any refinery case is the corporate structure. HF Sinclair’s structure includes a parent entity and operating subsidiaries — and the entity that holds the permit, the entity that employs the workers, the entity that contracted with outside maintenance crews, and the entity that owns the assets may not all be the same. Naming the right entity in a lawsuit is foundational. So is identifying any independent contractors, equipment manufacturers, or maintenance companies that may share responsibility for the conditions that led to the explosion. If a valve malfunctioned, if a contractor’s maintenance work created the conditions for the blast, or if a feedstock supplier delivered off-spec material that caused a process upset, each of those parties may carry separate liability — and separate insurance.
Your Legal Rights If You Were Injured in the Explosion
If you were one of the three people injured on October 31 — or if you were a contractor, vendor, or visitor on-site at the refinery when the explosion occurred — your legal rights depend on who you are, who employed you, and who controlled the conditions that caused the harm. New Mexico law provides several distinct paths to recovery, and the path that is right for you may not be the one the company or its insurance adjuster tells you about.
Negligence. The refinery operator owed a duty of reasonable care to every worker, contractor, and visitor on the premises to prevent explosions and toxic releases. That duty includes maintaining safe operations, complying with OSHA Process Safety Management standards, maintaining equipment integrity, conducting hazard analyses, and responding properly to emergency conditions. When the refinery fails in any of those duties and someone is injured, the operator is liable for the full measure of the harm — medical expenses, lost wages, loss of earning capacity, pain and suffering, physical impairment, disfigurement, and loss of enjoyment of life.
Strict liability for ultrahazardous activities. New Mexico recognizes a doctrine that is powerfully relevant here: strict liability for abnormally dangerous or ultrahazardous activities. Refinery operations — high-pressure hydrocarbon processing, flammable materials at enormous scale, toxic emissions — fit this doctrine squarely. Under strict liability, the operator is responsible for the harm caused by an explosion regardless of the level of care it exercised. The company cannot defend by saying it was careful. If the activity is ultrahazardous and it caused the harm, the company pays. This is a different and stronger theory than ordinary negligence, and it exists in New Mexico law precisely for facilities like the Navajo Refinery.
Negligence per se. If the investigation reveals that the refinery violated OSHA Process Safety Management standards, EPA Risk Management Program requirements, or New Mexico Environment Department air quality regulations, those violations may constitute negligence per se or serve as powerful evidence of negligence. A violation of a safety standard written to prevent catastrophic releases is not a technicality — it is proof that the company fell below the standard of care that the federal government and the State of New Mexico have already established for exactly this kind of facility.
Premises liability. If you were a contractor, vendor, or other non-employee worker present at the refinery, you were a business invitee. The refinery owed you a duty to inspect for and remedy dangerous conditions in the process units. If the condition that caused the explosion was known or should have been known to the refinery — through prior inspections, near-miss reports, or mechanical-integrity data — the refinery’s failure to address it is a breach of that duty.
Punitive damages. If the investigation and discovery process reveals that HF Sinclair had prior notice of the dangerous condition — prior OSHA citations, ignored internal safety audits, deferred maintenance on the unit that exploded, or prior near-miss incidents that were never investigated — New Mexico law allows punitive damages. Punitive damages exist to punish a defendant for conscious indifference or reckless disregard for the safety of workers and the community. New Mexico’s punitive damages framework requires a bifurcated proceeding and limits punitive exposure, but the exposure is real and, in a case with prior notice, it is the theory that can multiply the value of the case well beyond the direct medical and economic losses.
Workers’ Compensation vs. Third-Party Claims: The Fork That Decides Your Recovery
If you were a direct employee of HF Sinclair working at the Navajo Refinery on October 31, you are almost certainly covered by workers’ compensation. That is the first thing the company’s insurance representative will tell you — and they will say it as if it is the end of the story. It is not.
Workers’ compensation is a no-fault system. It pays medical expenses and a portion of lost wages regardless of who was at fault. But it is capped. It does not pay for pain and suffering. It does not pay for the full loss of your earning capacity. It does not pay punitive damages. And in most cases, it bars you from suing your direct employer directly.
Here is what the company may not tell you: if anyone other than your direct employer contributed to the conditions that caused the explosion, you can pursue a third-party claim against that entity — and a third-party claim is not capped, not limited to a benefit schedule, and not barred by workers’ comp exclusivity. The full measure of tort damages — including pain and suffering, loss of earning capacity, disfigurement, and punitive damages — is available in a third-party action.
Who might a third-party defendant be in a refinery explosion?
- An independent contractor performing maintenance, turnaround, or construction work at the refinery whose work contributed to the conditions that caused the explosion.
- An equipment manufacturer whose product — a valve, a pressure-relief device, a control system, a heat exchanger — failed in a way that caused or contributed to the blast.
- A feedstock or pipeline supplier that delivered contaminated or off-spec crude that caused a process upset leading to the explosion.
- A engineering or inspection firm that certified equipment as safe when it was not, or that failed to identify a hazard it was retained to find.
If you were a contractor employee — working for a company that HF Sinclair hired to perform maintenance, turnaround, or construction at the refinery — your situation is different in a critical way. Your direct employer provides workers’ comp, but HF Sinclair, as the premises owner and operator, is a third party. You may have a direct personal injury action against HF Sinclair for the full measure of tort damages, including pain and suffering and punitive damages, because HF Sinclair is not your employer. This is the fork the company hopes you miss. The workplace accident representation we provide includes identifying every defendant who may share responsibility for your injuries — not just the one whose name is on your paycheck.
Community Toxic Exposure: Legal Rights for Artesia Residents
You do not have to have been inside the refinery to have been harmed by what happened there on October 31. The smoke that wafted over Artesia carried whatever the fire released — and at a refinery, what fire releases is a catalog of substances that the human body was never built to process.
The coalition of more than twenty organizations that petitioned the New Mexico Environment Department on November 20, 2025, made the core point: the state operates air monitors in Carlsbad and Hobbs, but not in Artesia. The community has no permanent, real-time record of what was in the air on October 31 or in the days that followed. That gap is not just an environmental policy failure — it is a legal problem, because proving a community toxic exposure claim requires evidence of what was released, how much, and where it went.
Medical monitoring. New Mexico has recognized medical monitoring as a viable cause of action. Medical monitoring is a court-supervised diagnostic surveillance program for people who have been exposed to hazardous substances and who face an increased risk of disease as a result. It is not a damages award for being sick — it is the cost of watching, over years, to catch the disease early if it comes. For Artesia residents exposed to smoke, particulates, volatile organic compounds, and other pollutants released during the explosion and fires, a medical monitoring claim seeks to establish a funded program of periodic diagnostic testing — pulmonary function testing, blood work, imaging — so that if the exposure causes disease, it is found and treated as early as medicine allows.
Personal injury. If you have developed a respiratory condition, persistent symptoms, or any illness that you believe is connected to the smoke and pollutants from the October 31 explosion, you may have a personal injury claim. The challenge in community toxic tort cases is proving specific causation — that your condition was caused by this exposure rather than something else. That is why documenting your symptoms, seeking medical evaluation, and preserving any evidence of the exposure — photographs of the smoke, records of where you were, what you smelled, what you felt — matters from the very first day.
Property damage and nuisance. The explosion, fires, and resulting smoke interfered with the entire Artesia community’s use and enjoyment of property. Soot, odor, airborne contaminants, and the fear of what was in the air support both private nuisance claims for individual property owners and public nuisance claims. If your home, your business, or your property was affected by the smoke or the contaminants it carried, you may have a claim for property diminution and loss of use.
The community’s right to know. The Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act imposes mandatory release reporting obligations on facilities that release hazardous substances above threshold quantities. The community of Artesia has a federal right to know what was released during this explosion. If those reports were not made, or were delayed, or were incomplete, that failure is itself actionable — and it is evidence of the refinery’s disregard for the community that lives in its shadow.
If you are an Artesia resident with questions about community toxic exposure, toxic tort and community exposure claims are a core part of what we handle.
New Mexico Law: Strict Liability for Ultrahazardous Activities
New Mexico’s legal framework provides several advantages to plaintiffs in refinery explosion cases that you should understand — because the insurance company’s lawyers already know them.
Pure comparative negligence. New Mexico follows a pure comparative negligence rule. This means that if you were partly at fault for what happened to you — if you were in an area you were not supposed to be, if you failed to follow a procedure — your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault, but it is not barred entirely. Even if you were 50 percent at fault, you can still recover 50 percent of your damages. This is a plaintiff-favorable rule, particularly in industrial accident cases where the defendant’s operational failures usually dominate the causation analysis.
No general cap on compensatory damages. New Mexico has no general statutory cap on compensatory damages in personal injury or wrongful death actions against private defendants. This means that a jury can award the full measure of your economic losses — medical expenses, lost wages, lost earning capacity, future medical care — and the full measure of your non-economic losses — pain, suffering, physical impairment, disfigurement, loss of enjoyment of life — without a statutory ceiling cutting the number down. In a catastrophic burn or blast injury case, this matters enormously. The economic losses alone for a severely burned worker can run into the millions. The non-economic losses — what it is like to live with the scars, the pain, the surgeries, the lost ability to do the things you once did — have no price tag and, in New Mexico, no cap.
Strict liability for ultrahazardous activities. As noted above, New Mexico recognizes strict liability for abnormally dangerous activities. Refining crude oil — processing flammable hydrocarbons at high pressure and temperature, handling toxic substances at industrial scale — is the archetype of an ultrahazardous activity. Under this doctrine, the plaintiff does not need to prove the refinery was negligent. The plaintiff needs to prove that the activity was ultrahazardous, that the harm was the kind the activity creates, and that the activity caused the harm. The refinery cannot defend by showing it took every precaution. If the activity caused the harm, the refinery is liable.
Punitive damages. New Mexico allows punitive damages where the defendant acted with willful, reckless, or wanton disregard for the safety of others. The punitive damages framework requires a bifurcated proceeding — the jury first decides liability and compensatory damages, then, if warranted, considers punitive damages in a separate phase. Punitive exposure is limited to the greater of a statutory floor or a multiple of compensatory damages. In a refinery explosion case, the aggravators that support punitive damages are specific and discoverable: prior OSHA citations for the same or similar conditions, ignored internal safety audits, deferred maintenance on the unit that exploded, near-miss incidents that were never investigated, or management decisions to continue operating despite known hazards. If discovery reveals any of these, the case moves from a compensatory case to a punitive case — and the value multiplies.
Medical monitoring. New Mexico has recognized medical monitoring as a viable cause of action, which is critical for the Artesia community. This means that residents exposed to the smoke and pollutants from the October 31 explosion may be able to seek a court-supervised program of diagnostic surveillance — not because they are sick now, but because the exposure increased their risk of disease and early detection is the only medical answer to a toxic exposure that may take years to manifest.
Statute of limitations. New Mexico’s statute of limitations for personal injury and wrongful death is generally three years from the date of injury or death. Three years sounds like a long time. It is not. The evidence that wins these cases — surveillance footage, process data, witness memories, air quality readings — has retention windows measured in weeks and months, not years. The deadline to sue provides years. The deadline to save the proof provides days. That gap is the most important thing on this page.
“The Artesia refinery has operated for more than a century, making this not a new problem but a long-ignored one. No parent should have to wonder whether it’s safe for their children to trick-or-treat outside, breathe the evening air, or go to school the next morning.”
— from the coalition’s November 20, 2025 letter to the New Mexico Environment Department
The Regulatory Regime: OSHA, EPA, CSB, and What Their Investigations Mean for Your Case
A refinery explosion does not happen in a regulatory vacuum. The Navajo Refinery operates inside a web of federal and state safety and environmental regulations that were written — in many cases, written in blood — to prevent exactly what happened on October 31. Understanding these regulations is not academic. They are the standard of care. They are the evidence the case is built on. And the investigations they trigger produce findings that become powerful leverage in any civil case.
OSHA Process Safety Management (29 CFR 1910.119). This is the master rulebook for refinery safety. It is a fourteen-element program that applies to any process involving flammable materials at or above 10,000 pounds — and a refinery processes vastly more than that. The elements that matter most in an explosion case are:
- Process Hazard Analysis (PHA): The refinery is required to study every way the process could fail and document it. The PHA must be updated and revalidated at least every five years. If the PHA for the unit that exploded identified the hazard that caused the blast — and the refinery did nothing about it — that document is the case.
- Mechanical Integrity: The refinery is required to inspect and test pressure vessels, piping systems, relief and vent systems, emergency shutdown systems, controls, and pumps — and to document the results. If the pipe or vessel that failed had inspection records showing wall thinning, corrosion, or fatigue — and the unit kept running — that is not an accident. That is a decision.
- Management of Change (MOC): Any change to equipment, technology, or procedures that is not a like-for-like replacement must be evaluated for safety impact before it is made. If a modification was made to the unit that exploded without an MOC, the refinery skipped the one step that exists to catch exactly this kind of failure.
- Incident Investigation: The refinery is required to initiate an investigation within 48 hours of any incident — and to retain the investigation report for five years. That means near-miss reports from the years before the explosion may still exist. But the five-year retention floor also means older reports can be legally gone.
- Contractor responsibilities: The refinery cannot outsource the hazard. It is responsible for selecting, evaluating, and monitoring contractors who work on covered processes.
EPA Risk Management Program (40 CFR Part 68). Separate from worker-safety rules, the refinery was required to file a Risk Management Plan with the EPA — including a worst-case release scenario modeling how far a toxic cloud or blast would travel into the surrounding community. That filing exists. It was supposed to be updated at least every five years. The RMP’s five-year accident history is a documented record of prior releases at this facility — and it is publicly pullable.
U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB). The CSB is an independent federal agency with authority to investigate catastrophic chemical incidents at refineries. Its published findings routinely identify root causes — organizational failures, deferred maintenance, inadequate hazard analysis, ignored warnings — that become powerful evidence in civil litigation. The CSB’s investigation of the Navajo Refinery explosion, if one is opened, will take months to publish preliminary findings and potentially a year or more for a final report. Those findings are not legal conclusions — the CSB does not assign legal liability — but they are neutral, authoritative, and juries listen to them.
EPCRA release reporting. The Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act requires facilities that release hazardous substances above threshold quantities to report those releases to the National Response Center and to state and local emergency authorities. The community of Artesia has a legal right to know what was released on October 31. If those reports were not made, were delayed, or were incomplete, that failure is both a regulatory violation and evidence of the refinery’s disregard for the community.
New Mexico Environment Department. Under the state Air Quality Control Act, NMED establishes permitting, monitoring, and emission standards for the Navajo Refinery. The coalition’s November 20 letter to NMED Secretary James Kenney highlighted a gap that has existed for years: NMED operates air monitors in Carlsbad and Hobbs but none in Artesia — a gap that means the community has no baseline data, no real-time data, and no ongoing record of what the refinery releases into the air they breathe. That gap is both a policy failure and a legal problem for any community exposure claim, because proving what was in the air requires data that the state never collected.
Evidence Is Already Disappearing: What Proof Is Dying and Why Acting Now Matters
This is the section that matters most if you are reading this in the weeks after October 31. The statute of limitations gives you years. The evidence that wins your case gives you weeks — and in some cases, days. Every record, every device, every witness memory is on a clock, and the clocks are already running.
Refinery surveillance and security camera footage. The process units at the Navajo Refinery are almost certainly covered by surveillance and security cameras. That footage — the visual record of the explosion sequence, the fire spread, the emergency response, and the conditions in the unit before the blast — is critical for establishing what happened and when. Digital surveillance systems typically overwrite on a 30-to-90-day cycle. Footage from October 31, 2025, may be permanently gone by the end of January 2026 unless a litigation hold has been issued. This is the fastest-dying and most important evidence in the case.
Process Safety Management documentation. The PHA reports, MOC records, and mechanical integrity inspection reports for the unit that exploded are required to be retained by regulation — but they can be modified, supplemented, or reorganized after an incident. A preservation letter — what we call a spoliation demand — must go out immediately to freeze these documents in their current state. The PHA is the document that tells you whether the refinery already knew the hazard that caused the explosion existed. The MOC file tells you whether changes to the unit were evaluated for safety before they were made. The mechanical integrity records tell you whether the equipment that failed was inspected, when it was last inspected, and what the readings showed.
Distributed Control System (DCS) process data. The refinery’s computerized control system records temperatures, pressures, flow rates, alarm logs, and operator actions in real time. This data reveals whether the unit was operating within safe parameters at the time of the explosion, whether alarms were triggered and acknowledged, and whether operator intervention occurred. DCS historical data is typically retained for 6 to 12 months but can be overwritten. If the data is not preserved by a formal demand, the digital record of what the unit was doing in the minutes and seconds before the blast can be gone before the first lawsuit is ever filed.
Employee and contractor witness statements. The people who were on-site on October 31 — HF Sinclair employees, contractors, maintenance crews, vendors — are witnesses. They saw what happened. They know what warnings were given, what safety procedures were followed or bypassed, what the conditions in the unit were before the explosion. But witness memory degrades rapidly, and contractor personnel rotate off-site and become difficult to locate within weeks. The window to identify, interview, and preserve witness accounts is narrow.
Emergency response records. The 911 calls, fire department dispatch logs, and hospital intake records from October 31 corroborate the timeline, the severity of injuries, and the scope of community impact. But 911 recordings and dispatch logs are subject to agency retention schedules that can be as short as 30 to 90 days. Public records requests must be filed immediately.
Maintenance and turnaround records. The maintenance history of the process unit involved in the explosion — inspection dates, repair records, turnaround schedules, equipment replacement records — reveals whether the unit was properly maintained and whether known deficiencies were deferred. Physical maintenance records can be stored on-site and are subject to post-incident reorganization. Electronic records should be locked down with a preservation demand.
Air quality monitoring data. Because there is no permanent air monitor in Artesia, the data that would prove what the community was exposed to on October 31 may not exist unless independent air sampling was initiated in the immediate aftermath. The coalition’s letter to NMED highlights this gap. For any community exposure claim, the absence of baseline data is a challenge — but independent sampling, if initiated promptly, can still capture residual contaminants before they fully dissipate.
OSHA citation history. The Navajo Refinery’s OSHA inspection and citation history is public. Prior citations establish notice of unsafe conditions and support both negligence per se and punitive damages theories. These records are publicly available and should be compiled immediately. OSHA may also be conducting a new investigation whose findings will take months to publish — but the citation history that already exists can be organized and deployed now.
The preservation letter — the spoliation demand — is the single most important first step in any refinery explosion case. It is a formal written notice to the refinery, its contractors, and any third-party data vendors that identifies the evidence that must be preserved and warns that destruction of that evidence after the letter is received will result in sanctions, adverse-inference instructions, and separate claims for spoliation. The day you call is the day that letter goes out. Not the day after. Not next week. That day. Because every day that passes is a day the refinery’s surveillance system is one step closer to writing over the footage of what happened to you.
The Medicine: Burn, Blast, and Inhalation Injuries From a Refinery Explosion
We need to talk about the medicine — not because we are doctors, but because proving what happened to your body is the core of the damages case, and because the defense will exploit every gap between what the medical record shows and what you actually feel.
Thermal burns. A refinery flash fire can produce second and third degree burns in seconds. Doctors map the burned area against a body chart called the Rule of Nines — the front of each leg counts as 9 percent of total body surface area, the front of the torso as 18 percent, the head as 9 percent. That single number, the TBSA, drives almost every clinical decision that follows. The Parkland formula calculates fluid resuscitation: roughly 4 milliliters of IV fluid per kilogram of body weight per percent TBSA burned in the first 24 hours, with half due in the first 8 hours from the time of the burn — not from the time the ambulance arrived, from the time of the burn. Every minute of delay in resuscitation is a minute measured against a clock that started the instant the fire touched the skin.
Full-thickness burns — third degree — cannot heal on their own. They require grafting: surgeons harvest healthy skin from one part of the body and transplant it over the wound, creating two wound sites instead of one. The scars that form do not stretch like normal skin, which means that over joints, they tighten and limit movement. In a young person, every growth spurt can require another surgery to release the contracture. A serious burn is not one surgery and recovery. It is a lifetime of surgeries.
Inhalation injury. The smoke from a refinery fire is not woodsmoke. It can carry hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, benzene, and a range of volatile organic compounds. Inhalation injury burns the airway from the inside — the trachea and bronchi swell, and in severe cases, the airway can close hours after the exposure. Carbon monoxide poisoning from incomplete combustion can cause neurological damage that looks like a brain injury: memory loss, confusion, personality change. Singed nasal hairs, soot in the sputum, and a hoarse voice are the clinical triad that tells a burn doctor the airway is involved — and airway involvement means an automatic referral to a burn center under the American Burn Association’s published criteria.
Blast trauma. The pressure wave from a vapor-cloud explosion causes three categories of injury. Primary blast injury is the pressure wave itself — ruptured eardrums, blast lung (pulmonary barotrauma), and bowel injury. Secondary blast injury is flying debris — fragments of pipe, metal, glass that become projectiles. Tertiary blast injury is the body being thrown — producing fractures, head injuries, and internal organ damage equivalent to a high-speed motor vehicle crash. A worker who was caught in a refinery explosion may have all three, layered on top of thermal burns, creating a polytrauma pattern that requires intensive care, multiple surgical specialties, and months to years of rehabilitation.
The long arc. A catastrophic burn or blast injury does not end when the patient leaves the hospital. It begins a lifetime of medical care: reconstructive surgeries, scar management, physical therapy, occupational therapy, psychological counseling for post-traumatic stress and depression, pain management, and — if the person cannot return to the same work — vocational rehabilitation. A life-care plan, built by a certified life-care planner and reduced to present value by a forensic economist, is how a real damages number is built. It accounts for every future surgery, every medication, every therapy session, every piece of adaptive equipment, and every year of lost earning capacity — projected across the person’s expected remaining lifespan and stated in today’s dollars.
For families who lost someone — or who may lose someone — the wrongful death claims process in New Mexico involves both a wrongful death action, which belongs to the surviving family members and compensates their losses, and a survival action, which belongs to the estate and carries the claim the deceased person would have had — including the pain, suffering, and economic loss they experienced between injury and death.
What the Insurance Company Is Already Doing: The Playbook and How to Counter It
Lupe Peña spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm before he came to this side of the table. He sat in the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims exactly like yours. He knows their playbook because he helped write it. Here is what the refinery’s insurance company is already doing — and what you need to do about it.
Play 1: The friendly “just checking in” call. Within days of the explosion, someone friendly will call you or your family. They will say they are “just checking on you” and ask you to “just tell us what happened” — on a recording. This is not a welfare call. It is a recorded statement, engineered to get you to say things that will be quoted against you later. You were feeling okay. You were not sure what happened. You maybe were not supposed to be where you were. Every word is a nail in your coffin.
The counter: Do not give a recorded statement to the insurance company without your lawyer present. You are not required to. Your workers’ comp claim does not depend on it. Say, “I am not ready to give a statement. I will have my attorney contact you.” Then call us.
Play 2: The fast settlement check. A check may arrive fast — sometimes before the full extent of your injuries is diagnosed. It will come with a release attached, often on the back of the check. The release, once signed, extinguishes your right to pursue any further claim related to the explosion — including claims you do not yet know you have because the MRI has not been done yet, the infection has not set in yet, the cancer has not appeared yet.
The counter: Do not sign anything from the insurance company without having a lawyer read it. Do not cash a check that has a release printed on it. The first offer is a fraction of what the case is worth — that is why it comes fast.
Play 3: The “you were partly at fault” argument. The adjuster will look for any fact that lets them assign a percentage of fault to you. You were in an area you were not assigned to. You did not follow a procedure. You were not wearing the right PPE. Every percentage point they pin on you is money — deducted from your recovery under New Mexico’s pure comparative negligence rule.
The counter: New Mexico’s pure comparative negligence rule reduces your recovery but never eliminates it. Even if you were partly at fault, you can still recover. But the company will fight hard for every percentage point because every point is dollars. Having a lawyer who can prove the company’s operational failures dominated the causation analysis is what keeps those percentages low.
Play 4: The IME — their doctor, not yours. The insurance company may send you to an Independent Medical Examination — a doctor they choose, who is paid by them, who will write a report saying your injuries are less severe than your treating physicians say. The IME doctor is not independent. The report is a tool to reduce the value of your medical damages.
The counter: Your treating physicians — the burn specialists, the trauma surgeons, the pulmonologists who actually cared for you — carry far more weight than a defense-hired examiner. But the IME report must be answered with your own medical evidence, and that requires a lawyer who knows how to prepare for and counter the defense exam.
Play 5: Social media surveillance. The insurance company will monitor your social media. A photograph of you at a family gathering, smiling, will be used to argue that you are not as injured as you claim — even if you were in agonizing pain that entire day and left early. A post about being “okay” will be quoted out of context.
The counter: Set your social media to private. Do not post about the explosion, your injuries, your recovery, or your activities. Do not discuss the case online. Assume everything you post will be read aloud in a courtroom.
Play 6: The delay aimed at the clock. The insurance company knows the statute of limitations. They also know the evidence clocks. They may stall, request additional documentation, make partial offers, and drag negotiations past the point where surveillance footage has been overwritten and witness memories have faded. The delay is not accidental. It is engineered to destroy the evidence that would have proven your case.
The counter: The preservation letter goes out the day you call. The evidence is frozen. The delay stops working. This is why acting early — not aggressively, but early — is the most protective thing you can do.
What a Case Like This Is Worth: Damages and Case Value
No lawyer can tell you exactly what your case is worth without reviewing your medical records, your employment history, the investigation findings, and the specific facts of what happened. But we can tell you how the number is built and what the ranges look like — because that honesty is what you deserve.
For the three directly injured individuals. Direct injury claims against a deep-pocket refiner, with moderate to severe burn, blast, or inhalation injuries, typically range from $1 million to $10 million per plaintiff. That range is driven by the severity of the injuries, the length of hospitalization, the number of surgeries, the permanency of the harm, the lost earning capacity, and — critically — whether punitive damages can be supported by prior notice of the dangerous condition. For three plaintiffs, the worker-injury component alone can yield $3 million to $30 million.
For community toxic tort and medical monitoring claims. The community exposure component adds $2 million to $30 million depending on the viability of class or consolidated treatment, the scope and duration of the release, the ability to establish specific causation for individual community plaintiffs, and the cost of a court-supervised medical monitoring program. The absence of a permanent air monitor in Artesia is a challenge to the community case — but it is also an aggravator, because it means the refinery and the state failed to collect the data that would have told residents what they were breathing.
For punitive damages. If discovery establishes that HF Sinclair had prior notice of the dangerous condition — prior OSHA citations, ignored safety audits, deferred maintenance, near-miss incidents — punitive damages are warranted and can add a multiple of compensatory damages subject to New Mexico’s statutory framework. Punitive damages are the theory that can take a case from seven figures to eight.
Venue reality. The case would likely be filed in the 5th Judicial District Court serving Eddy County. Eddy County is an oil-industry-dependent community, and the refinery is a major local employer and economic anchor. That presents a potential deflator — jurors who depend on the industry for their livelihoods may be reluctant to return large verdicts against a local employer. But that reluctance is not insurmountable. The case must be framed around corporate accountability to the community — the company’s duty to the people who live in its shadow — rather than anti-industry sentiment. A jury of Artesia residents who breathed the same smoke on October 31 may understand the community harm in a way no outsider can.
Collectibility. Collectibility is excellent. HF Sinclair is a publicly traded company with significant financial resources and insurance depth. A judgment against the operating entity is a judgment that can be satisfied.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
The First 72 Hours: What to Do and What Not to Do
If you were injured in the October 31 explosion — or if someone you love was — here is what the first 72 hours should look like.
Medical care first. Get medical treatment. Follow every recommendation. If you were burned, get to a burn center — the American Burn Association’s referral criteria send chemical burns, burns to the face or hands, burns over 10 percent of the body, and any suspected inhalation injury to a specialized burn center. If you were examined at an emergency room and sent home, follow up with a specialist. Symptoms that seem minor in the first hours — a cough, a headache, a hoarse voice, a small burn — can become life-threatening in the days that follow. Do not minimize. Do not tough it out. Get seen, get documented, and get treated.
Document everything. Photograph your injuries. Photograph the scene if you safely can. Write down — or have a family member write down — exactly what you remember about the explosion: what you saw, what you heard, what you smelled, where you were, what you were doing, what warnings you received, what safety procedures were followed or bypassed. Memory degrades fast. Get it on paper now.
Do not give a recorded statement. To anyone. Not to the refinery’s insurance company, not to HF Sinclair’s risk management department, not to a third-party investigator who shows up at your hospital room or your home. Say, “I am not ready to give a statement. I will have my attorney contact you.” Then call a lawyer.
Do not sign anything. No release, no waiver, no settlement agreement, no authorization to obtain your medical records — nothing. If someone puts a document in front of you and asks you to sign it, do not sign it until a lawyer has read it. A release signed in the first days after an explosion, before the full extent of your injuries is known, is the cheapest settlement the insurance company will ever buy.
Do not post on social media. About the explosion, your injuries, your recovery, your activities, your feelings — anything. Set your accounts to private. Assume everything you post will be read in a courtroom.
Preserve physical evidence. If you have the clothing you were wearing, the PPE, the hard hat, the tools — keep them. Do not wash the clothing. Do not return the equipment. Bag it, label it, and store it. Every piece of physical evidence is a piece of the reconstruction.
Call a lawyer. The preservation letter — the spoliation demand that freezes the surveillance footage, the process data, the maintenance records, the witness statements — goes out the day you call. Not the day after. The evidence that wins your case is dying on a clock that started October 31. Every day you wait is a day closer to that evidence being gone forever.
How We Build Refinery Explosion Cases: The Proof Story
Here is how a refinery explosion case is actually built — not in the abstract, but in the specific sequence that takes a case from the first phone call to the number at the end.
Week one: the preservation letter. The day you call, a written preservation demand goes to HF Sinclair, its operating subsidiaries, its contractors, and any third-party data vendors. That letter identifies by name the evidence that must be preserved: surveillance footage from the unit involved, PSM documentation, DCS process data, maintenance and turnaround records, the OSHA 300 log, incident reports, near-miss reports, the PHA and its revalidation history, every MOC touching the failed unit, and the personnel files and training records of the operators on duty. The letter warns that destruction of this evidence after receipt will result in sanctions and adverse-inference instructions. From the moment the letter is on file, the refinery cannot destroy the evidence without consequences.
Weeks one through four: records demands and public-records requests. We file public-records requests for the 911 calls, the fire department dispatch logs, the hospital intake records, and the OSHA citation history. We pull the EPA RMP filing — including the five-year accident history and the worst-case release scenario. We pull the FMCSA and state records for any trucking or transportation components. We compile the refinery’s regulatory footprint.
Months one through three: expert investigation. We engage a refinery process safety engineer to reconstruct the explosion mechanism — what failed, why it failed, and what the refinery’s own hazard analysis said about the risk before it happened. We engage a board-certified toxicologist and industrial hygienist to model the community exposure — what was released, how far it traveled, what the concentrations were, and what the health risks are. We engage a burn or trauma surgeon to document the mechanism and progression of the injuries. We engage a forensic economist to build the lifetime damages projection.
Months three through six: discovery and depositions. The PSM file for the unit that exploded is the first target. The process hazard analysis, the management of change records, the mechanical integrity inspections, and the near-miss reports from the preceding 24 months — these documents reveal whether the refinery knew or should have known of the condition that caused the explosion. The depositions of the safety director, the plant manager, the unit operators, and the maintenance supervisors follow. Under oath, the people who ran the refinery explain the company’s choices — and the gaps between what the safety program said on paper and what actually happened on the unit.
The number at the end. The number is built from all of it. The medical records and the life-care plan. The lost wages and the lost earning capacity. The pain and suffering and the physical impairment and the disfigurement. The property damage and the community exposure. The punitive aggravators — the prior citations, the ignored warnings, the deferred maintenance. A well-documented demand, supported by expert opinions and the refinery’s own records, is what creates settlement pressure. And if the carrier unreasonably refuses to settle within policy limits, the exposure above the limits becomes the carrier’s problem, not the company’s.
You can hear Ralph Manginello discuss whether you should get a lawyer after a refinery accident — the question that brought you to this page.
Who We Are: Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña
Ralph P. Manginello is the Managing Partner of Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. He has been a licensed Texas attorney for 27+ years, admitted November 6, 1998 (Texas Bar #24007597), and is admitted to practice in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas, including the federal bankruptcy court. Ralph earned his J.D. from South Texas College of Law Houston in 1998 and his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in Journalism and Public Relations. Before he was a lawyer, he was a journalist — and that training shows in every case. He knows how to find the fact that the other side hopes you will not find, and he knows how to tell a story to a jury that makes the company’s choices visible. Ralph is a member of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, the Houston Bar Association, and the Trial Lawyers Achievement Association — Million Dollar Member. The firm has recovered over $50 million for its clients, including a $5 million+ brain-injury settlement, a $3.8 million+ amputation settlement, and a $2.5 million+ truck-crash recovery. Ralph is currently lead counsel in the active $10 million+ Bermudez v. Pi Kappa Phi / University of Houston hazing lawsuit in Harris County. Ralph’s full background is available for your review.
Lupe Peña is an Associate Attorney at the firm (Texas Bar #24084332, admitted December 6, 2012; admitted U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas). Lupe earned his J.D. from South Texas College of Law Houston in 2012 and his B.B.A. in International Business from Saint Mary’s University in San Antonio in 2005. He is a third-generation Texan with family roots to the King Ranch, born and raised in Sugar Land, where he still lives. Lupe is fluent in Spanish — he conducts full client consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. And here is the advantage that matters to your case: Lupe is a former insurance-defense attorney. He spent years at a national defense firm, inside the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims. He knows how the insurance company values a claim — how they set reserves in the first 48 hours, how they pick IME doctors, how they use surveillance, how they engineer delays. He now uses that inside knowledge for injured clients. Lupe’s full background is available as well.
We handle refinery explosion cases, catastrophic injury and workplace accident cases, and toxic tort cases. We work with local counsel in New Mexico where required, and we do not claim an office in New Mexico. What we bring is the trial experience, the regulatory knowledge, and the insider understanding of how the insurance company operates — the combination that builds these cases from the evidence up.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long do I have to file a lawsuit for the Artesia refinery explosion?
New Mexico’s statute of limitations for personal injury and wrongful death is generally three years from the date of injury or death. That means a personal injury claim arising from the October 31, 2025, explosion would generally need to be filed by October 31, 2028. However, the discovery rule may extend the deadline for latent injuries — diseases or conditions that do not appear or are not connected to the exposure until later — and some claims may have different deadlines. But the statute of limitations is not the clock that should worry you. The evidence that wins your case — surveillance footage, process data, witness statements — has a shelf life of weeks to months, not years. The deadline to sue gives you years. The deadline to save the proof gives you days.
I was a contractor working at the refinery, not an HF Sinclair employee. Can I still sue?
Yes — and your case may be stronger than a direct employee’s. Workers’ compensation is generally the exclusive remedy against your direct employer, which means you usually cannot sue your own employer for negligence. But HF Sinclair, as the premises owner and operator, is a third party. As a contractor, vendor, or business invitee, you can pursue a direct personal injury action against HF Sinclair for the full measure of tort damages — including pain and suffering, loss of earning capacity, disfigurement, and punitive damages — none of which are available through workers’ comp. This is the fork the company hopes you miss.
I live in Artesia but was not at the refinery. I breathed the smoke. Do I have a claim?
You may. New Mexico has recognized medical monitoring as a viable cause of action, which means residents exposed to the smoke and pollutants from the explosion may be able to seek a court-supervised program of diagnostic surveillance to catch any disease the exposure may cause, early. If you have developed respiratory symptoms, persistent cough, headaches, or any illness you believe is connected to the smoke, you may also have a personal injury claim. The challenge is proving specific causation — that your condition was caused by this exposure. Documenting your symptoms, seeking medical evaluation, and preserving evidence of the exposure (photographs of the smoke, records of where you were) matters from day one.
The insurance company already called me and wants a recorded statement. Should I give one?
No. Do not give a recorded statement to the insurance company without your lawyer present. The call is not a welfare check — it is an evidence-gathering technique engineered to get you to say things that will be used to reduce or deny your claim. You are not required to give a statement to the other side’s insurance company. Say, “I am not ready to give a statement. I will have my attorney contact you.” Then call us.
The company offered me a settlement check already. Is it a good deal?
Almost certainly not. A settlement offer in the first days or weeks after an explosion — before the full extent of your injuries is diagnosed, before the MRI is done, before the infection sets in, before the life-care plan is built — is designed to close the case cheaply. The first offer is a fraction of what the case is worth. That is why it comes fast. Do not sign anything, do not cash a check with a release attached, and do not accept any offer without having a lawyer evaluate it against the full measure of your current and future losses.
What if I was partly at fault for my injuries?
New Mexico follows a pure comparative negligence rule. Your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault, but it is not barred entirely. Even if you were 50 percent at fault, you can still recover 50 percent of your damages. In refinery explosion cases, the defendant’s operational failures — the failure to maintain equipment, the failure to follow process safety management rules, the failure to investigate near-misses — usually dominate the causation analysis. The company will try to pin percentage points on you because every point is money off their payout. Having a lawyer who can keep those percentages low is what protects your recovery.
Will there be a class action for the community of Artesia?
Community toxic tort claims may be evaluated for class or consolidated treatment, particularly for medical monitoring damages. Whether a class action is viable depends on the number of affected residents, the similarity of their exposures, the ability to establish common proof of what was released, and the court’s willingness to certify a class. Even if a class is not certified, individual community claims can be pursued, and consolidation — where multiple cases are managed together for pretrial purposes — may still provide efficiency and leverage. Each resident’s situation is unique and should be evaluated individually.
How much does it cost to hire a lawyer for a refinery explosion case?
We work on a contingency fee basis: 33.33 percent before trial, 40 percent if the case goes to trial. We do not get paid unless we win your case. The consultation is free. We advance the costs of investigation — expert witnesses, records requests, depositions — and those costs are repaid from the recovery. If there is no recovery, you do not owe us attorney’s fees. This is how we make sure that anyone — regardless of their financial situation — can afford the same quality of legal representation as the insurance company’s lawyers.
What if someone died as a result of the explosion?
If any of the three injured individuals succumb to their injuries — or if the explosion caused a death that has not yet been publicly reported — New Mexico law provides two separate causes of action. A wrongful death action belongs to the surviving family members and compensates their losses: lost financial support, lost companionship, lost guidance, funeral expenses. A survival action belongs to the estate and carries the claim the deceased person would have had: the pain, suffering, and economic loss they experienced between the injury and death. A personal representative — the one person New Mexico law authorizes to bring the family’s case — must be appointed by the court. We handle that appointment. The statute of limitations for wrongful death in New Mexico is generally three years from the date of death.
When You Are Ready to Talk
You do not have to decide today whether to file a lawsuit. You do not have to know all the answers. You do not have to have your medical records organized or your evidence collected. You just have to make one call — so that the preservation letter goes out, the evidence is frozen, and your rights are protected while you focus on what matters most: getting well, and being with the people who need you.
The call is free. The consultation is confidential. We are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We do not get paid unless we win your case. And if we are not the right fit for your situation, we will tell you — and we will point you to someone who is.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911. That is 1-888-288-9911.
Hablamos Español. Lupe Peña conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. If your family communicates in Spanish, we will meet you in your language.
This page is legal information, not legal advice. Every case is different. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. Contacting the firm is free and confidential. The firm works with local counsel in New Mexico where required and does not maintain an office in New Mexico. Ralph Manginello is licensed in Texas and admitted to the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas. Lupe Peña is licensed in Texas and admitted to the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas. Nothing on this page states or implies that the firm has been retained by, has investigated, or has taken any action on behalf of any person injured in the October 31, 2025 explosion at the Navajo Refinery in Artesia, New Mexico. This page is provided as a legal resource for individuals and families who may be affected by this or a similar incident.