Iowa Jury Awards $1.7M in Home Explosion Lawsuit

A Black Hawk County jury has awarded $1.7 million in damages in a lawsuit filed by a Hudson woman who was burned in a propane explosion at her home in 2008.

Sixty-eight-year-old Donna Figard and her husband, Richard, sued propane provider New Century FS over the explosion, which leveled their home. The couple claimed the company didn’t do enough to warn them about the limits of odor-causing chemicals injected into the gas as a warning and didn’t adequately warn them about the importance of leak detectors.

The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier says the jury reached a verdict on Monday after a two-week trial. The jury found the propane company was 40 percent at fault, which means it pays 40 percent of the damages.