Eva Rowe, 22 and unemployed, comes from a small town in Louisiana and sports heavy make-up and streaked hair. She seems an unlikely figure to take on the world’s second-biggest oil company.

Her parents, James and Linda Rowe, were among the 15 people killed in an explosion at the BP refinery in Texas City in March last year, America’s worst industrial accident in 15 years.

The British behemoth has agreed confidential financial settlements with every other bereaved family — even with Ms Rowe’s older brother — but so far she has refused the millions of dollars that BP has offered her.

Next week Ms Rowe’s civil lawsuit will be the first of hundreds filed against BP to reach court — and that is the last thing the company needs as it struggles to repair its image after a calamitous couple of years: an orphaned girl versus a greedy corporate giant — a foreign one, to boot.

Backed by a silver-tongued, media-savvy lawyer named Brent Coon, Ms Rowe tells anyone who will listen that she wants to have confidential BP documents allegedly revealing the extent of the company’s “wrongdoing” aired in open court, and to force it to raise the safety standards at its refineries around the world.

“If I take the money and go away, all the documents will remain confidential and my parents’ deaths will be in vain,” she told The Times.

“My parents were my best friends,” she told the CBS programme 60 Minutes last Sunday. “They’re all I had. My life ended that day. BP ruined my life.”

“She wants her pound of flesh,” Mr Coon, who has swept-back blonde hair, a broad Southern drawl and his own PR agent in New York, said.

BP “wants to sweep the most damning of the information that’s been driving the litigation back under the rug and go on down the road — Eva doesn’t want that”.

To compound BP’s embarrassment, Mr Coon has won a court order forcing Lord Browne of Madingley, the chief executive of BP, to give evidence, an order that BP is challenging.

“We believe he has personal knowledge about many of the things that led to this explosion,” said Mr Coon, citing BP’s decision in 1999 to seek a 25 per cent reduction in its fixed costs.

Texas City is an hour south of Houston, at the end of a hot and humid road where the United States peters out into the Gulf of Mexico. It has little in the way of a centre or soul, only a vast oil refinery — 485 hectares (1,200 acres) bristling with tanks and towers, pipes and pylons, power lines, flares and chimneys belching smoke.

This is BP’s largest refinery, with a capacity of 460,000 barrels of oil a day, and easily the biggest employer in a town of 40,000 people. It does not welcome journalists — The Times was hustled off its property — but hanging prominently on its perimeter fencing are banners proclaiming, in English and Spanish: “Stop Work If You Think It’s Not Safe.”

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