Hutchinson ? A natural gas storage cavern near Hutchinson had been leaking since its re-opening in 1992 and its owners didn’t take the steps needed to control it, attorneys for two businesses destroyed by explosions in 2001 said as trial of their lawsuits began Thursday.

But attorneys for Tulsa-based ONEOK Inc. countered that they could establish the integrity of the storage cavern through October 2000, just months before explosions. And, said company attorney Lynn Hirsch, the gas that caused the explosion that destroyed the two businesses on Jan. 17, 2001, was not ONEOK’s.

The explosion and fire that day, one of a series of natural gas eruptions in Hutchinson, about seven miles from the storage field, destroyed the downtown businesses — Woody’s Furniture and Dicor Party Wedding and School Supplies. Another explosion at a mobile home park the next day killed a couple whose survivors reached an out-of-court settlement with ONEOK.

ONEOK, which also faces a class action lawsuit in Reno County, was fined $180,000 by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

The trial that began Thursday in Sedgwick County District Court on behalf of the two destroyed businesses involves suits that were filed against ONEOK and two companies it owns, Kansas Gas Services and Mid-Continent Market Center. The businesses seek $2 million in actual and punitive damages.

Mark Biberstein, a Wichita attorney representing Woody’s and Dicor, said an active natural gas spot market led ONEOK officials to pack gas into the cavern at pressures above those approved by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

“The evidence will reveal a company that continually did the cheap thing and not the right thing,” he said.

He said evidence would show “continual violations” of the maximum allowable operating pressures of the well and “paying no regard to proper monitoring of the Yaggy storage field.”

ONEOK and Topeka-based Western Resources, which owned the storage field before ONEOK, knew when the field was reopened in 1992 that the cavern had the potential to leak, Biberstein said.

He said a consultant, Dick Armer, wrote: “This is the most troubled well of all we have; this is a known.”

But Hirsch said flatly that Biberstein was wrong.

“You’ve been misled time and time again,” Hirsch told jurors.

Hirsch said that level pressures in the storage cavern between Oct. 25 and Dec. 12, 2000, proved that the cavern was intact just a month before the gas explosions.