Fracking Found Responsible for Blast that Severely Burned Entire Family – No One Charged

“This is an explosive gas. Large bubbles and pockets of this methane escaping from a water well, any sort of spark will start a fire.”

On the fateful day in 2014, Murray and his father approached the pump house on the 160-acre property outside Perrin, around 60 miles northwest of Fort Worth — but what happened next forced the former oil industry worker to react immediately.

“At the flip of the switch, Cody heard a ‘whooshing’ sound, which he instantly recognized from his work in the oil and gas industry, and instinctively picked his father up and physically threw him back and away from the entryway to the pump house,” the lawsuit states. “In that instant, a giant fireball erupted from the pump house, burning Cody and [his father], who were at the entrance to the pump house, as well as [wife] Ashley and A.M. [the couple’s minor child], who were approximately twenty feet away.”

The Tribune notes, “The blast was caused by a buildup of methane gas in the water well that caused enough pressure to send water spraying in the family’s pump house. Ashley Murray turned off the well pump and asked her husband to investigate, and when he turned it back on, the gas exploded, severely burning” the four family members.

Thirty-eight-year-old Cody received “severe and extensive” burns to the body, the court filing notes, leaving him “permanently disfigured and disabled.”

EOG Resources settled with the Murrays, but attorneys say methane and drilling chemicals leaked from a Fairway well with a faulty seal and traveled through subterranean fractures before tainting the family’s water and building up dangerous pressure at the well.

As regulator of the state’s oil and gas industry, the Texas Railroad Commission initiated an investigation of the explosion that is ostensively ongoing, but has yet to produce any results or details for disclosure to the public.

In fact, RRC thus far lists the result of its investigation as ‘inconclusive.’

“There is nothing new to report at this time,” Ramona Nye, spokeswoman for the Railroad Commission, told the Texas Tribune. “The Commission takes this and every incident we investigate very seriously.”

She added, “As with any incident, our technical experts base their work on the appropriate science and data necessary to complete a thorough and comprehensive investigation.”

Citing ongoing litigation, Fairway Resources refused to comment on either WFAA or the Texas Tribune — and family attorneys would not permit litigants to discuss the case with the media.

But, in the meantime, studies commissioned by Murray family attorneys have found conclusive evidence hydraulic fracturing is as insidious as detractors have been warning for years.

Fairway Resources drilled its JT Cook #2 well in 2013, and about a month later, the Singleton family, who joined the Murrays’ lawsuit, observed noticeably murky water coming from faucets and informed the Railroad Commission — whose inspectors rushed to deny energy production was responsible, despite tests plainly pegging fracking as the culprit.

Indeed, lawyers and investigators claim RRC recklessly ignored the Singletons’ complaint of tainted drinking water — a warning sign gas had dangerously befouled the supply.

Hamilton, the Murrays’ attorney, hired “Thomas Darrah, a geochemist at Ohio State University; Franklin Schwartz, an Ohio State University hydrologist; Zacariah Hildenbrand, chief scientific officer at Inform Environmental; and Anthony Ingraffea, a civil engineering professor at a Cornell University with expertise in hydraulic fracturing” to investigate whether that gas well had caused both families’ issues.

Darrah compared samples from local water wells with those from the Fairway well, and found, “The JT Cook #2 oil and gas well displays a geochemical match to samples of groundwater in the Singleton’s and Murray’s water wells in all of the measured data.”