'It's hard not to break': Daughter of Plum house explosion victims continues to grieve without closure

Wherever Taylor Oravitz goes, her childhood home goes with her.

The Plum native had her Rustic Ridge Drive home’s GPS coordinates tattooed on her forearm, though not for nostalgia’s sake. Rather, it’s a kind of memorial in ink and flesh.

On Aug. 12, 2023, a massive explosion at her family’s home — which stood at 40°30’59.3”N 79°44’40.3 W — killed Taylor’s parents, Paul and Heather Oravitz, and four others who were inside; flattened the homes of two neighbors; and damaged a dozen buildings nearby.

The shockwaves from the blast reverberated from neighbors in Plum to news outlets nationwide. Investigators dug for details — and came up with little.

In the two years since the blast, despite the media attention, Taylor and her younger brother, Cole, have learned to grieve without closure.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to heal until we get answers,” Taylor Oravitz, 25, of Pittsburgh, told TribLive on Monday in her first public comments since the explosion. “That’s the hardest part. We can’t just miss our parents.”

On Monday, as attorneys readied lawsuits alleging overpressurized gas lines and a 2.5-inch gash in one pipe fueled the blast, Oravitz told TribLive she did not want to speak about natural gas wells near the lot where her home once stood.

She instead talked about tattoos and Topsail Island, a 26-mile-long barrier island off the North Carolina coast whose serene beaches the Oravitzes visited religiously.

Taylor embraces both topics. A tattoo of an ocean wave is emblazoned near the GPS numbers. Cole, now 23, and their parents had ink to match, each with their own variations. Their father, for example, placed a shark-fin alongside his wave tattoo.

Taylor and Cole have returned to Topsail Island twice since their world turned upside down. The first time, nine months after the explosion, the siblings spread their parents’ ashes along a quiet beach.

Despite the comforts of their second home, something was clearly missing. Taylor describes it as a kind of hole.

“The first time, it just felt weird,” she said. “(We said) ‘What do we do to make this our new normal? How do we carry on this tradition without them here with us?’”

Both siblings turned to tattoos. Cole, like his sister, asked an artist to tattoo the GPS coordinates on his arm. Taylor had two heart-shaped lockets bearing her parents’ initials tattooed near her wrist — “my heart on my sleeve,” she joked Monday, with a hesitant smile.

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Taylor knows most children live to bury their parents. She just wasn’t ready to do it at 23, she said.

Returning from North Carolina to her native Pittsburgh has helped Taylor. She said it’s provided familiarity and a safety net.

The unspoken symbiosis between the siblings salves the sting of the catastrophe more — sometimes in unexpected ways. Cole takes comfort in regularly mowing the grass where the Oravitz home once stood.

Taylor likes lugging a chair to the empty lot at 141 Rustic Ridge Drive and catching up with neighbors. They always sip one of her parents’ favorite cocktails: cans of Southern Tier’s Vodka Transfusion, a buzzy concoction combining the titular spirit with ginger ale, grape and lime.

Taylor always pours out a can onto the lawn in her parents’ memory.

Neighbors often join them.

“That little part of that neighborhood, we were all family — closer than blood,” Taylor said.

Taylor, a paralegal who sports a photogenic bronze tan, was living in North Carolina and planning to move to Florida to pursue a doctorate when the explosion occurred. Her cellphone lit up the morning of Aug. 12, 2023, with a litany of unknown 412 phone numbers.

She quickly pivoted, returning to Pittsburgh and studying and writing her dissertation online. Her brother needed her, she said.

“I knew I would choose my brother over anything I would do for myself,” she told TribLive. “All I wanted was to be close to my brother and look after him as best I could.”

Though Taylor and Cole visit their old Plum neighborhood, they are not cemented there. This Saturday, the siblings plan to return to their favorite beach spot.

Their parents, Taylor said, will be there, too.

“It’s hard not to break. It’s hard not to break when people talk to you or come up to you and want you to talk about your parents,” Taylor said. “It’s hard talking about them sometimes. Some days are better than others.

“But I think we really try to present ourselves as, ‘We miss our parents so much. We want nothing more than for them to be here,’” she added. “But we’ll figure it out. We have each other.”