The Dallas Court of Appeals has reversed a $1.8 judgment against a well-servicing company arising from injuries to another contractor’s employee during a test of the integrity of the well’s tubing.
Well-Pro Services, L.P. v. Ramon Torres (No. 05-23-00773-CV; April 30, 2025) arose from a workplace accident in which Plaintiff sustained injuries while employed by Talon Tools & Testing under a contract with Dallas Production to reconfigre an oil and gas well. Under the contract, Talon conducted hydrostatic-pressure testing on the tubing going into the well. Dallas Production also contracted with Well-Pro to assist in the removal of tubing using a workover rig. On the day of the accident, Talon conducted several pressure tests and found a possible leak in a section of the tubing. Talon’s operator provided Torres, a Talon employee, with replacement rubber grommets to put on the testing tool to verify whether the leak was in the tool or the tubing being tested. Torres did so and reassembled the testing tool. Well-Pro employees then reinserted the tool into the tubing. Torres inserted the “stinger” into the tool, and the operator in the tanker truck released the valve to pressurize the tube with water. At that point, a large section of the took was ejected from the well bore, impaling Torres through his left hip and leg.
Torres sued Dallas Production and Well-Pro for negligence. Dallas Protection designated Talon as a responsible third party and reached a settlement with Torres. That left Well-Pro in the lawsuit. Torres amended his pleading to assert claims for negligence, premises liability, and contemporaneous negligent activity. The case was tried to a jury, which returned a verdict finding Well-Pro liable under either a negligence or premises liability theory. The jury assigned 46% of the fault to Well-Pro, 10% to Dallas Production, and 44% to Talon and awarded $4 million in compensatory damages. Applying the percentages of fault, the trial court rendered final judgment against Well-Pro from $1,840,000 plus pre- and post-judgment interest. Well-Pro appealed.
In an opinion by Justice Kennedy, the court of appeals reversed. Well-Pro challenged the judgment on legal and factual insufficiency grounds, arguing that the evidence conclusively demonstrated that Talon was responsible for the accident and that Plaintiff failed to show any negligence by Well-Pro that proximately caused Plaintiff’s injuries. Pointing to Talon’s ownership of the testing tool and its responsibility for inspecting and assembling it, Well-Pro argued that it neither controlled nor determined when Talon’s operator released the valve to pressurize the tool. It was, Well-Pro continued, the operator’s premature pressurization that proximately caused the accident. Talon conceded that had the tool not broken, the accident would not have occurred. Torres responded that there was more than one proximate cause, and that was Well-Pro’s rig operator signaling to Torres to insert the stinger before the next stand of tubing was in place over the testing tool. Torres produced expert testimony to the effect that Torres responded to the rig operator’s signal, and that Talon’s operator pressurized the tank when he saw Torres insert the stinger. Well-Pro, however, contended that even so, Talon’s operator should not have pressurized the tool before the next stand of tubing was actually in place.
Here, as the court observed, “all witnesses, including Torres, testified that [Talon’s operator] was trained to wait to pressure up until the next stand of tubing was in place and that Well-Pro did not signal him to pressurize the testing tool. . . . [the operator] was in the testing truck from where he had an unobstructed view of whether the next standing of tubing was place over the testing tool.” The operator admitted that he was trained to wait to pressurize until the tubing was in place and contradicted Torres’s claim that Well-Pro was “in charge” of Talon’s workers at the site, including the operator who pressurized the tool. The question boiled down to whether “it was reasonably foreseeable that Well-Pro’s rig operator’s signal to Torres and delay in placing the next stand of tubing over the testing tool would cause [Talon’s operator] to pressurize the testing tool before the next stand of tubing was in place.” The court ruled that Talon’s operator’s decision to pressurize the tool before the next stand of tubing was in place was a new and independent, or superseding cause of the accident, and that Well-Pro’s rig operator’s signal to Torres “only furnished the condition for the accident.”
The court next considered Torres’s expert’s testimony that Talon’s operator was operating on “muscle memory” when he pressurized the tool and that Well-Pro didn’t give Talon’s workers an “opportunity to regroup” after replacing the rubber grommets. This didn’t persuade the court, which ruled the expert’s opinion speculative and insufficient to establish proximate cause. The court reversed and rendered judgment that Torres take nothing on his claims against Well-Pro.
This case is worth noting because of its discussion of superseding causation. The court of appeals conducted a thorough and thoughtful review of the evidence in reaching the conclusion that the operator’s error broke the chain of causation between Well-Pro and Plaintiff’s injury.
