Plum waterlines working as designed on day of deadly home explosion, municipal authority says

Plum Municipal Authority officials said the borough’s water system and hydrants were working as designed when firefighters responded to a house explosion that killed six people in the Rustic Ridge neighborhood on Aug. 12.

Firefighters initially attempted to pull water from the hydrants at a greater rate than the system could supply, as they battled flames that spread from the explosion to nearby homes, authority chairman William Bonura said at Tuesday’s board meeting.

Bonura explained the 8-inch water lines at the housing plan were part of a gravity-fed water system, with tanks near the top of a hill servicing 14 hydrants at 500 gallons per minute.

Firefighters used 6-inch and four or five 4-inch hoses as they attempted to pull between 1,500 and 2,000 gallons of water per minute.

“It’s not a looped neighborhood,” Bonura said. “It’s one line in, one line out. … They’re taking it out of the bottom of the system because everywhere the trucks stopped going up the road, they jumped on to the fire hydrants.

“Before we could feed the neighborhood water, they were taking it out, and it wasn’t getting to the top trucks. When they realized that, they backed off of their trucks and they started letting the water flow up through the neighborhood as it was.”

Firefighters were forced to bring in a slew of tankers to help fight the fires.

“Our system is working correctly,” Bonura said. “Every hydrant that we have is in complete operation. If it’s not, it’s immediately fixed.

“Our system is running as the engineers have designed it. Our boards have taken everything and approved it to the highest level that we can approve it to.”

Investigators concluded earlier this month that the point of origin of the explosion at 141 Rustic Ridge Drive was inside the house.

Paul and Heather Oravitz, Kevin Sebunia, Mike Thomas and Casey and Keegan Clontz were killed in the explosion.

Three homes were destroyed by the blast; 10 homes have been identified as possibly being structurally compromised.

The home at 141 Rustic Ridge was owned by the Oravitzes, and all six victims were inside that home when it exploded.

Ways to improve

Authority officials met with several Plum fire chiefs Sept. 13 to discuss the system.

Bonura said one of that meeting’s outcomes was a color-coded system to identify hydrants and their water pressure.

The authority is in the process of flushing out its lines and 601 hydrants to gather that data.

Authority manager Howard Theis said residents will notice service disruptions as part of that process, and it is likely not going to continue into the winter because of possible freezing.

The authority is also working with Bankson Engineers to do hydraulic modeling of its system and make recommendations on ways to improve it.

“It’s a tool that we can look at,” Theis said. “If we’re planning to change a water line in a certain area for whatever reason, we can evaluate that.… Will we get the biggest bang for our buck by doing this repair or that repair? That’s what (modeling) is used for.”

The authority oversees 135 miles of water lines, not including service lines to individual homes. There is no deadline to complete the system check.

Rustic Ridge resident Amber Yon, former Oakmont Borough engineer and a civil engineer at Penn Environmental & Remediation, volunteered her services to review the modeling data and work with the authority.

She was the only resident at the board meeting to ask about the neighborhood water supply.

“We wanted to make ourselves available should you need any third-party review of any calculations,” Yon said. “We want to be part of the fixes. It becomes personal.”

Bonura said board members plan to attend a Plum fire chiefs meeting within the coming weeks to further discuss the system, as well as new training areas and locations to fill up firefighter tankers.