Topeka ? A company held partly responsible for deadly 2001 gas explosions in Hutchinson can’t avoid paying $5.25 million in punitive damages, but two businesses will lose much of what they were awarded for property losses, the state’s highest court ruled Friday.

The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision was mixed for Mid Continent Marketing Center Inc., a subsidiary of natural gas company ONEOK Inc., headquartered in Tulsa, Okla. – and for operators of Woody’s Furniture and Decor Party Supplies of Kansas.

Three years after the explosions, a Sedgwick County jury found ONEOK and Mid Continent both at fault and awarded the two businesses more than $1.7 million to compensate them for their losses.

District Judge James Fleetwood then ordered Mid Continent to pay the additional punitive damages.

The Supreme Court said the first part of the award should have been reduced to reflect insurance settlements, and returned the case to Fleetwood for further proceedings.

But the justices rejected Mid Continent’s claim that the punitive damages were excessive and violated the company’s rights to due legal process.

In the court’s decision, Justice Donald Allegrucci noted that Fleetwood concluded that Mid Continent was driven by its profit motive to abandon “prudent” operating procedures, ignored significant dangers, operated without regard to Hutchinson’s safety, withheld information from regulators and failed to cooperate with the public.

“Woody’s and Decor point out that the trial judge found a good deal of evidence of seriously reprehensible conduct,” Allegrucci wrote.

Before the explosions, 143 million cubic feet of natural gas leaked from a cavern several hundred feet underground at Yaggy Field, northwest of Hutchinson, and rapidly seeped toward the city, where it shot up through abandoned wells. A blast rocked downtown Jan. 17, 2001, destroying two stores and leaving other nearby buildings in flames.

Gas geysers 30 feet high erupted, forcing hundreds of people out of southeast Hutchinson for several days. The downtown leak was being burned off when another explosion the next day killed a couple at a mobile home park.

ONEOK, without admitting a link between the Yaggy Field leak and the explosions, reached a confidential settlement in August 2002 with the couple’s relatives.

Meanwhile, Mid Continent, in appealing the award of punitive damages to the two businesses, noted that no one died in the explosion that consumed Woody’s and Decor Party Supplies. Allegrucci countered that the lack of deaths was “by sheer chance.”

“But the potential harm was prodigious, and the harm likely to result from defendants’ conduct is to be taken into account in calculating punitive damages,” Allegrucci wrote.

The damages the two businesses received for their property losses presented other issues, however.

The business owners received almost $1.45 million from their insurance companies, and ONEOK and Mid Continent later settled with the insurers before those insurers sued them to recover what the businesses had been paid.