Cody Murray, a former oil field services supervisor, could immediately hear that something was wrong – very wrong – with his North Texas water well. In an instant he darted back and shoved his elderly father to the ground before a fireball erupted 30 feet in each direction from the well house.

Murray's nearby wife and daughter suffered first degree burns, and his father fared slightly worse. But the flames engulfed Murray, now 38, catching his t-shirt on fire.

"The skin was sloughing off his body," said attorney Chris Hamilton, who filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Murrays last month in a Dallas County Court, accusing nearby oil and gas operations of contaminating groundwater with the methane that caused the explosion in August 2014.

Legal battles over industrial pollution are nothing new, but this case touches on a flashpoint issue in Texas: hydraulic fracturing, which simultaneously brought the state billions of dollars while throwing up a plethora of public health and environmental objections.

The Murrays' well blew up on the family ranch, just 1,000 feet from the nearest gas well, about 50 miles northwest of Fort Worth in the Barnett Shale region—the birthplace of fracking.

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"This is sort of a battleground and any new decision will probably be significant beyond its importance," said Jim Blackburn, a Houston-based attorney of environmental law and professor at Rice University. "It's the pivotal point we are at with fracking."

To win the case, he said, the Murrays must prove that the methane in their water supply was not common natural contamination.

Scientific studies have shown that gas wells drilled for fracking can leak into groundwater. The first was led by researchers at Duke University in 2011, and showed a link between methane contamination in water wells and their proximity to gas drilling sites.

Study author Robert Jackson, now with Stanford University, said that drilling shafts can puncture gas pockets which can flow through buried crevices into water supplies.

"I'm not saying that means it happened [in this case]," he said. "But in principle it is plausible."

He said contamination generally only occurs in poorly-built wells where the cement casing surrounding the shaft is cracked or inadequate. Hamilton, the Murrays' attorney, said that's just what happened.

He pointed to records from the Texas Railroad Commission which showed that casing on the nearest gas well to the Murrays' property, one operated by EOG Resources, Inc., didn't match reports filed by the company. They also showed that casing extended down about 550 feet, even though an initial schedule planned for 1000 feet. That well, Hamilton said, was drilled horizontally, directly under the Murrays' well.

EOG and another company named in the suit, Fairway Resources, LLC, both said they do not comment on pending litigation.

Hamilton said that contracted testing showed that the methane was not natural contamination because it bore markers of very deep-earth gas that couldn't plausibly migrate up near the surface so quickly without help from a driller. The well water also isn't as salty as the kind that would typically come up with some natural methane.

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Conclusively proving that the methane game from a fracking well will be tough.

"It's difficult," Jackson said. "You have to do a lot of work."

Scientists would need to test the gas from the nearby wells, but also chart any separate gas pockets they may have tapped, access that gas and test it, too.

Blackburn noted he was once very confident that it was methane contamination from a nearby landfill that had made one of his client's tap water flammable. But in the course of trial, testing showed the gas came from a deep natural source.

"It's very complex," he said. "These things are not always what they appear."

Hamilton said he is working with the RRC and independent contractors to do complete testing on the wells. In the meantime, Murray lives with the results of the disaster. Third degree burns destroyed nerves in his arms, so he can't feel the steering wheel to drive, needs his wife's help to set the shower temperature and "can't even pour a pitcher of tea," Hamilton said.

He's seeking compensation of medical costs, suffering, disfigurement, lost income, lost earning capacity and other things.