The family of a Beauregard Parish teen who was killed in an oil field tank battery explosion that hurled her body hundreds of yards from the tank site is suing a Texas oil company and the company’s insurer for negligence.
Zalee Day-Smith died Feb. 28, 2021 while she was on top of the unsecured oil tank about 500 feet from her home on property operated by Urban Oil and Gas Group LLC. The oil tank battery contained “shut-in” well sites, where oil and gas can be stored without being directly connected to pipelines.
The lawsuit, which was filed Dec. 23 in federal court in the Western District of Louisiana, comes in the wake of the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources announcing new regulations designed to improve safety at such industrial sites. Attorney David L. Wallace, one of the attorneys representing 14-year-old Zalee’s family, said that the new regulations, while welcome, point to deficiencies in past efforts to regulate such oil battery sites.
Louisiana Commissioner of Conservation Richard Ieyoub
“It is deeply unfortunate and incredibly saddening that it requires the horrific and violent death of a child in the state of Louisiana for our representatives to come together to make this change to the Louisiana Administrative Code,” Wallace said in a letter to the Louisiana Record. “These changes are absolutely an admission of (at best) an oversight in the Administrative Code or (at worst) purposeful neglect.”
The family is seeking damages for “severe and debilitating mental anguish, pain and suffering, and loss of enjoyment of life,” according to the lawsuit.
Louisiana Commissioner of Conservation Richard Ieyoub said in November that the rule change will better protect the public from potential hazards associated with these types of sites. The new rule mandates 4-foot fencing around batteries near populated areas when unmanned and the securing of entry hatches to the tanks, as well as warning signs.
“We may never know exactly what happened on that site when Zalee died,” Ieyoub said in a prepared statement, “and accidents of that kind may be rare, but we have to do what we can to minimize the chances of it ever happening again by doing more to make people aware of potential hazards and keep them off these sites if they don’t belong there.”
Urban Oil and Gas Group did not respond to a request for comment.
The Urban Oil and Gas Group site in Longville is similar to dozens of other abandoned, unused or shut-in well sites that Wallace has been aware of in his years of living in rural Louisiana.
“It had zero fencing,” he said. “It had zero warning signs. It also was located less than 500 feet from inhabited dwellings and a church. … Considering that most all wells and tank batteries in rural areas are in disrepair and poorly maintained, it is easy to see how shut-in wells are essentially bombs.”