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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