“Greed, speed and lack of heed” caused the death of an electrician at a West Texas midstream energy plant in 2019, a lawyer for his parents told a Dallas County jury Tuesday.
Michael K. Hurst of Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann said plant officials and the contractor Gabriel Vela worked for “cut corners, skipped safety meetings, took shortcuts and didn’t heed industry standards” because they were in a hurry to complete an expansion the Lobo III midstream facility in Luling County.
His comments came in opening statements in a wrongful death suit filed by Maria de los Angeles Rodriguez, identified in the suit as Vela’s widow. A jury trial before state District Judge Monica McCoy Purdy is expected to take two weeks.
Lawyers for the defense said Vela, 44, caused the deadly accident on May 4, 2019, by doing work in a portion of the plant’s motor control center where he wasn’t authorized to be working and by improperly removing isolation barriers, or safety shields, in an electrical cabinet, thereby exposing live conductors inside the cabinet. An electrician with 25 years’ experience should have known better, they said.
“I don’t like blaming Mr. Vela, but that’s where the facts lead,” said J.J. Knauff of the Miller Law Firm, principal lawyer for EnLink Midstream, the Dallas-based operator of the Lobo plant, and for Delaware G&P, the EnLink subsidiary that owns the 26-acre plant in Mentone, Texas.
The suit seeks unspecified damages, including exemplary damages. Knauff told the jury, without putting a number to it, that Vela’s family would be asking it to award a “generational” amount of money.
The other defendants in the suit are OGT, the electrical contractor for which Vela worked, and Applied Consultants Inc., the on-site safety representative hired by EnLink to oversee the plant expansion.
The lead lawyer for OGT is Jim Grau, managing partner of Grau Law in Dallas. The lead lawyer for Applied Consultants is William R. Moye of Thompson Coe in Houston.
The suit was filed in 2019 by Rodriguez, who said she was Vela’s spouse and the administrator of his estate. She’s represented principally by McAllen trial lawyer Ray Thomas. Hurst’s clients, Vela’s parents, Amanda and Jose Vela, entered the suit as intervenors on the plaintiff’s side.
Thomas said the defendants “paid lip service” to workplace safety.
The electrical cabinet Vela was working on when he was killed was tagged as being “de-energized,” meaning power to it was shut off. However, Thomas said, that tag was left over from work done days earlier and wasn’t removed when the power was turned back on.
“Nobody did anything to ensure that equipment or area was prepared and ready for the work that Gabriel was doing,” he said.
Knauff, the EnLink lawyer, said there were lights blinking inside the electrical cabinet and that it was making whirring sounds, which should have made it obvious to an experienced electrician that the cabinet was “hot.”
Moye said Applied Consultants, as EnLink’s on-site safety consultant, was under no obligation to train Vela to do his job.
Hurst said both Amanda and Jose Vela have serious health problems and that their son provided financial support for them and other family members.
“The death of a child,” Hurst told the jury, “is the most devastating, most gut-wrenching” event a parent can endure.
Defense lawyers said they plan to challenge the plaintiff’s claim that she had standing to sue as Vela’s spouse. They told jurors they would present evidence undermining her claim of a common-law marriage. She and Vela, Knauff said, maintained separate bank accounts, split household expenses and filed separate income tax returns in which they both identified themselves as single.