In August, a major corporation was found partially liable for the January 2020 explosion that killed three people in Houston, injured dozens, and destroyed hundreds of area homes and several businesses.
The verdict marked the latest setback for Detcon, a 3M subsidiary that served as an inspection vendor for Watson Grinding and Manufacturing before the explosion. As a businessman who has worked in the energy and other sectors in Texas, I think this case raises alarms about tort liability in the state when it’s stretched beyond a business’s actual responsibility and control. Maintaining meaningful tort reform in business friendly states like Texas is absolutely necessary to protect legitimate claims while preventing liability from expanding beyond reasonable limits.
The facts leave no doubt about who caused the explosion. U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) investigators determined that a degraded hose was leaking propylene gas and the valves to an outside propylene storage tank weren’t closed. Watson Grinding also lacked adequate process-safety- management system, operating procedures, and emergency-response training to address such hazards. Despite experiencing a previous explosion in 2008, gas detectors intended to alert operators and trigger remote shutoff were disconnected from the computer system, all but ensuring another disaster.
It’s clear Watson Grinding didn’t just neglect its systems; it also neglected warnings from gas sensor calibration contractors, who warned the company about its disconnected gas detectors on three separate occasions.
To make matters worse, Watson Grinding then filed for Chapter 11 less than a month after the disaster and is proceeding to be liquidated.
This brings us to the recent court decision against 3M, which has been found partially responsible for the explosion in three out of four decisions since 2025. The courts have determined that 3M should pay over $200 million in damages. In each case, the underlying claim was that Detcon, the gas sensor contractor, failed in its duties because its technicians knew that the facility’s gas-detection equipment was defective and had a responsibility to take further steps, such as refusing services, “red-tagging” the equipment, or alerting the authorities about any safety-critical defects.
But here’s the question that these cases ignore: If a company that neither owns nor operates a facility warns a customer about a dangerous condition and can still be held responsible when the customer doesn’t fix it, what does that mean for anyone doing business in Texas? 3M acquired Detcon in 2017 but offloaded it in 2019, six months before the Watson Grinding explosion. The matter at hand was unequivocally Watson Grinding’s responsibility.
Anyone working in the energy sector, especially in Texas, wants safety inspectors to identify problems and warn operators. No one wants employees to suffer or victims to go uncompensated when companies fail to keep their facilities safe. But issuing a warning does not mean assuming responsibility or liability for everything the operator then fails to do.
If that becomes the standard, business confidence will erode. Business owners will not accept unlimited and ambiguous liability. Costs and insurance premiums will rise, and fewer contractors will be willing to service high-risk facilities, which are precisely the places where experienced safety professionals are needed most. That does not improve safety. It punishes companies for identifying danger while shifting responsibility away from the operator that actually controlled the facility. This is the reality of modern tort litigation and runaway verdicts.
Businesses should be held accountable for what they do and what they control. But justice is not served by pursuing the company with the deepest pockets or by erasing the line between a contractor’s responsibility and an operator’s responsibility. If warning a customer about a known danger makes the contractor liable when the customer fails to address it, companies have every reason to reconsider the risks of doing business in Texas.
Chad Hagan is a financier, author, executive producer, and philanthropist involved in economic and environmental policy in the United States and United Kingdom. He serves as a trustee of the Hagan Family Foundation, a Fellow of the Linnean Society, a member of The Explorers Club, and an IUCN Commission member. He studied at Harvard and the University of London.
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