Two people are fighting for their lives after a violent electrical incident at a Fort Worth gas station Friday afternoon — the latest in a troubling string of electrocution emergencies to rock the North Texas region.
The incident unfolded just before 2 p.m. at a Shell gas station on Berry Street at East Loop 820 in East Fort Worth, where two victims were nearly electrocuted under circumstances that authorities were still working to fully explain. Both were rushed to trauma centers — one airlifted or transported to Parkland Hospital in Dallas, the other to a Fort Worth trauma hospital — and both were listed in critical condition as of Friday evening.
A Scene That Moved Fast
Fort Worth fire spokesman Craig Trojaceck addressed the victims’ condition and transport in the immediate aftermath of the incident, though the full details of exactly what triggered the electrocution were not immediately released. Gas stations, with their dense infrastructure of fuel pumps, underground lines, and overhead electrical connections, present unique and underappreciated hazards. One wrong contact — and it’s over in seconds.
Still, even for a city that’s seen its share of electrical tragedies, Friday’s incident lands hard.
A Region No Stranger to Electrical Tragedy
Fort Worth has been here before. More than once. In one of the most heartbreaking cases in recent memory, 12-year-old Alex and 11-year-old Isaiah Lopez were electrocuted in a wooded area at Oakland Lake Park after coming across a downed power line. The two boys never made it home. A vigil was later held in their honor, drawing a grieving community to the very neighborhood where they lost their lives.
That story was confirmed by multiple outlets. The Star-Telegram noted that “two children, both boys, were electrocuted by downed power lines Wednesday evening near a park in east Fort Worth,” citing a fire official directly. Fox 32 also covered the deaths, which reverberated well beyond Texas.
Workers Haven’t Been Spared Either
It’s not just parks and gas stations. On May 10, 2021, two construction workers sustained serious burn injuries after downed power lines made contact with a rock hauler truck they were operating near Jacksboro Highway outside Fort Worth. The legal and medical fallout from that incident was documented extensively, underscoring the particular danger that electrical infrastructure poses to people working in and around heavy equipment.
Then, just last year — October 24, 2024 — two men ended up hospitalized after being shocked while on the job inside a Lake Worth business on White Street. “Two men are in the hospital after they were shocked at work,” a local station reported at the time, in the kind of blunt shorthand that barely captures how fast these situations can turn fatal.
Even the Sky Has Been a Threat
How much can one metro area take? The Fort Worth Fire Department has also responded to incidents involving children struck by lightning — cases where kids playing near trees were hit with electrical energy after a strike, hospitalizing them and terrifying their families. Nature, infrastructure, workplace hazards — the sources are different, but the outcome keeps repeating itself.
The two victims from Friday’s Shell station incident remain in critical condition. No additional information about what precisely caused the electrocution had been released as of publication. Investigators are expected to examine the site, and utility involvement has not been ruled out.
What’s clear is that in a sprawling, fast-growing city like Fort Worth, the invisible dangers of electrical infrastructure — overhead, underground, and everywhere in between — keep finding people who had no idea they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A gas station stop on a Friday afternoon. That’s all it was supposed to be.
