An aerial view of a the Rustic Ridge neighborhood in Plum the day after a house explosion that killed six people. (Sean Stipp | TribLive)
Story by BRIAN C. RITTMEYER
Photos by TribLive
August 11, 2024
As a Plum community pauses to remember those who died in a fatal house explosion a year ago, questions about the cause remain unresolved and a mayor is demanding answers.
Six residents in the Rustic Ridge neighborhood died as a result of the massive Aug. 12 explosion, which sent shock waves that were felt throughout the borough and beyond. The blast destroyed three houses and caused significant damage to a dozen more. A house across the street remained standing but eventually had to be razed because it was uninhabitable. Its rebuild is nearly complete.
Cleanup took months, and some neighbors still haven’t returned.
The past 12 months have brought much change to Rustic Ridge Drive, but they haven’t brought answers.
The Allegheny County Fire Marshal’s Office, the lead investigating agency, has not determined a cause and the investigation remains ongoing, said Kasey Reigner, spokeswoman for the county’s Department of Emergency Services. She did not say how much longer the investigation is expected to take.
The county has not released information about the investigation since Sept. 8, about 11 months ago.
That has not sat well with Plum Mayor Harry Schlegel.
“I don’t want any dancing around it. I want to know exactly what the hell your findings are,” he told TribLive. “There has to be something. With the technology we have today, there has to be something they can tell us.”
The fire marshal’s office declined to comment for this story.
“I can assure you we have been in constant communication with the municipal groups and Rustic Ridge (homeowners association),” Reigner said.
Husband and wife Paul and Heather Oravitz, father and son Casey and Keegan Clontz, and neighbors Mike Thomas and Kevin Sebunia died as a result of the blast.
The explosion originated at the Oravitz home at 141 Rustic Ridge Drive on what had been a calm and quiet Saturday morning. Of the others inside the home at the time of the explosion, the Clontzes lived around the corner on Brookside Drive, Thomas lived next door at 139 Rustic Ridge and Sebunia lived at 135 Rustic Ridge.
Paul Oravitz was found alive by neighbors in the immediate aftermath and was pulled from the rubble. He died in a hospital four days later.
Neighbors said this corner of Rustic Ridge is a close-knit community. They often can be found at each others’ houses, helping with a weekend chore or celebrating a special occasion. Thomas was Plum’s well-known borough manager. Heather Oravitz was the borough’s director of community development.
Members of the families who lost loved ones in the explosion declined to comment for this story.
But those who live there described more of a family feel than that of just casual neighbors. They look after each other.
That’s what has made this even more difficult than it already would have been.
On Monday, about 10:23 a.m. — a year to the approximate minute of the explosion — the community’s churches are planning to ring their bells for several minutes. It was a request Schlegel and Plum council made to honor those who died.
The neighborhood also had planned a private ceremony Saturday for remarks, a prayer and a moment of silence.
“It’s a combination of remembrance as well as moving forward,” said Schlegel, whose son lives just a few houses away from the explosion site. “We are doing it this year and this year only. The community has been moving forward. We want to continue that as well as the families. It’s going to take them a great deal more time than the rest of us.”
Greg Renko, president of the Rustic Ridge Homeowners Association and an Allegheny County police detective who helped pull Paul Oravitz from the rubble, did not respond to requests for comment.
A remembrance Mass is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Monday at St. Januarius Church on Renton Road.
Also Monday, Borough employees will observe a moment of silence, council President Paul Dern said.
“We’re trying to keep it low key,” Dern said. “It’s just going to be a moment of silence. We’re just asking everybody in their own way to observe it in any way they feel like doing.”
Rick Napoleon wasn’t sure what he would be doing Monday.
His home, directly across the road from the Oravitz house, was so severely damaged that it had to be torn down, including the foundation. The family opted to have a new house built within the old home’s footprint and is planning to begin moving in Sept. 4, he said.
Napoleon said he took Monday off work, but his plans remained up in the air.
“I don’t know how to put it into words,” he said. “I’m aware of (the anniversary). I’ve thought about it. But I haven’t processed it.”
Napoleon and his family have spent most of the time since the explosion at a rental in Murrysville. They have called Rustic Ridge home for a little over 18 years.
“We’ve been away for a year. We’re in a time void,” he said. “You don’t think about it until you go to the house and you drive through the plan. Right now, we’re just living day by day as we go through this process. Once we’re actually in the house and in the plan every day, I think time will resume.”
The state Public Utility Commission in July announced there was no link between Peoples Gas service lines and the explosion. An investigation by the agency’s safety division has been closed.
Casey Clontz was a Peoples employee.
“The tragic events in Rustic Ridge have had a profound effect on all of us at Peoples,” spokesman Nick Paradise said in a prepared statement. “We continue to mourn the loss of life, including that of our colleague and friend, Casey Clontz, and his son, Keegan. Our hearts remain with his family and all those impacted by this tragedy.”
In its Sept. 8 report, the fire marshal said the explosion originated within the Oravitz home and that nothing outside the house, such as wells and pipelines, was involved.
Within days of the explosion, the fire marshal’s office said it was aware that Paul and Heather Oravitz were having issues with a hot water tank and was investigating its role in the explosion.
Five days after the explosion, Gov. Josh Shapiro ordered the state Department of Environmental Protection to launch an investigation. In September, the agency said its preliminary results found the explosion was not caused by the migration of stray gas.
After getting additional reports, DEP spokeswoman Lauren Camarda said its conclusion remains consistent with its preliminary findings “that the incident was not caused by migration of stray gas from oil and gas infrastructure under DEP’s oversight.”
The explosion was the third in Plum since 2008. The cause of a house explosion on Hialeah Drive in April 2022 remains under investigation, Reigner said.
It all has led to a sense of unease, Schlegel said.
“The community deserves to know, absolutely,” he said. “There’s a lot of anxiety here. It’s under the surface: ‘Is my place next?’”
Napoleon isn’t sure whether the public will ever know what happened.
“I don’t think (knowing is) going to make losing anything better,” he said. “It doesn’t for me.”
When it comes to a public-sector investigation of a catastrophic incident such as Rustic Ridge, investigators tend to take their time, said Richard Meier, owner of Meier Fire Investigation in Palmetto, Fla.
A certified fire and explosion expert, Meier has been investigating such disasters for 14 years. His company investigates fires and explosions for attorneys and insurance companies across the nation.
Meier said he is familiar with the Rustic Ridge incident but has not been involved with it in a professional capacity.
“The private sector works a lot faster, or they try to. Public sector investigations are not speedy in general,” he said. “They’ll try to work with the interested parties and try to investigate everything possible to a point.”
Public-sector investigators first will focus on finding whether there was criminal activity involved and then the potential fault of a public utility.
“Sometimes you don’t find the answer. That’s perfectly acceptable in the world of fire investigation. Sometimes it can take years,” he said. “Fires and explosions tend to destroy evidence. The less evidence you have, the harder the job becomes.”
In Loudoun County, Va., the fire marshal’s office released the preliminary cause of a Feb. 16 house explosion seven days after the incident. Although it remains under investigation, the office announced on Feb. 23 that the explosion was caused by a leak in a 500-gallon underground propane tank.
The explosion killed a firefighter, injured 13 people and caused about $2.5 million in damage to several homes.
Three investigations, including a criminal investigation, are ongoing, said Laura Rinehart, public information officer for Loudoun County’s Combined Fire and Rescue System.
“We really tried hard to put out a lot of safety information right off the bat, because people were afraid,” she said. “It’s not that we don’t want to put information out. We’re trying to protect the integrity of the investigation.”
Once an investigation is closed, that information can become accessible to the public under open records laws, Rinehart said.
“Leaving it undetermined can bide time for investigators to get the process done without having to release much information,” she said. “They do that for various reasons. Sometimes that’s why they’ll leave it undetermined. Once they put out a formal cause, then all that stuff is (accessible to the public).”
The Rustic Ridge explosion was captured on a nearby doorbell camera. Meier reviewed the video for TribLive.
“What I see is a catastrophic explosion, which I would characterize as a high-order explosion,” he said. “That means that the explosion is doing a significant amount of damage. It blew the house basically to smithereens.
“That tells me that the air-fuel mixture in the house was close to what we call the theoretically perfect mixture of air and fuel,” he said. “When you have that, generally speaking, you’ll get your strongest explosion.”
Meier explained that too little gas or too much won’t ignite. As the gas level comes up or down, there would be smaller explosions until the mixture of gas and air is just right.
“When you have that near-perfect mixture of air and fuel, you get the fastest combustion and the strongest explosion,” he said.
The most likely cause is a natural gas leak, Meier said. One of the two possible scenarios, an external gas leak from a main or service line, has been eliminated. The other possibility is a leak within the house from a worn valve or one of the gas appliances.
A small leak over time could have resulted in a large buildup of gas, Meier said. In that situation, people could become immune to the scent of the odorant added to natural gas.
“It takes so little energy to ignite a flammable gas,” he said. “Static electricity or flipping a light switch could set it off.”
Jessika Labertew and her husband, Mike, had family in Rustic Ridge. They became residents there themselves in June, buying a house within sight of the three now-vacant lots where the homes were destroyed last August.
The house they bought had some minor damage — such as to windows — as a result of the explosion that was fixed before the family moved in.
Labertew said she was apprehensive about living in Rustic Ridge, but the couple wanted to move from Penn Hills to Plum for the school district and their son, Asher, 4. The PUC report that the Peoples gas lines were not at fault “made me feel a little bit better,” she said.
“We just really liked the house. We wanted a nice neighborhood with kids in it for our son,” she said. “The neighbors are super nice. It’s peaceful. It’s been a really pleasant experience coming to this neighborhood.”
Labertew said she doesn’t walk her dog past the properties where the Oravitz, Thomas and Smith families’ homes once stood and that now are just grass fields. It’s not that she’s afraid. She doesn’t want to risk her dog desecrating what she called hallowed ground.
Labertew said she has been asked many times why she would move to Rustic Ridge.
“This is supposed to be our forever home,” she said. “We cannot not go after our dreams because of something horrible that happened.”
The explosion and past year have changed Napoleon’s outlook on life.
“You think you have a plan, then something like this happens and it changes your perspective,” he said. “I’m not planning for life as far in advance. I’m living a little more in the present.”
Some actions have been taken over the past year to address concerns with the fire hydrant system in Plum’s Rustic Ridge neighborhood after a house explosion in August 2023 exposed their limitations.
The actions include boosting water flow to the neighborhood and providing volunteer firefighters with data on how much water can be expected to be pulled from each hydrant across the borough.
More work, however, remains to be done, said Howard Theis, manager of the Plum Borough Municipal Authority, which operates the water system.
Following the Aug. 12 explosion of Paul and Heather Oravitz’s home on Rustic Ridge Drive, the system of 14 hydrants serving about 200 homes in Rustic Ridge was found to not provide enough water flow to fight one house fully engulfed in flames, Logans Ferry fire Chief Steve Marsh told TribLive in a November report.
Marsh was the incident commander the day of the explosion, overseeing operations as firefighters from more than 20 departments fought the fire that spread from the Oravitz home to the houses on either side, including one owned by Plum borough Manager Mike Thomas.
Responding firefighters tried to pull 1,500 to 2,000 gallons per minute from the hydrants as they faced three burning buildings, according to Plum Municipal Authority Chairman William Bonura.
But the hydrants could only provide 500 gallons per minute.
Glenn Kopec, administrator for the Allegheny County Emergency Services Fire Academy, echoed Marsh’s assessment that it would not have been enough to put out one fully engulfed house, based on the average size of homes in the plan. At least 700 gallons per minute would be needed, he said.
The municipal authority recently worked with the borough to complete a new waterline connection on Mike Thomas Way, where the municipal center is located. That increased the capacity of Rustic Ridge’s hydrants to 700 gallons per minute, Theis said.
Mike Thomas Way was renamed from Old Mine Road in Thomas’ memory.
But Rustic Ridge remains a closed, or nonlooped, system, with one waterline in and one waterline out. In a looped system, more waterlines would provide water to the area, so there would be less of a drop in flow as hydrants are tapped.
Changing the system would require running a new waterline to Rustic Ridge, at a cost of $700,000 to $800,000, Theis said.
The authority’s board has not decided whether to pursue that project, he said.
A model showing how much each water hydrant across the borough can produce was completed, and that information has been given to the four Plum fire departments, Theis said.
It found few areas with flow rates of 500 gallons per minute, the least the authority wants, Theis said. There are several in the range of 750 gallons per minute, with most above 1,000 gallons and some over 2,000 gallons, he said.
Despite having that information, Marsh said his department still calls for water tankers to all structure fires, which he started doing after the explosion.
“An estimated hydrant flow map is still an estimate. It’s not fact,” Marsh said. “If we get there and don’t need (water tankers), we have the ability to say, ‘We’re good. Go home.’”
Jim Sims, Plum’s emergency management coordinator and chief of the Holiday Park Volunteer Fire Department, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Here’s a summary of key developments related to the explosion of a home in Plum’s Rustic Ridge neighborhood on Aug. 12, 2023:
• Aug. 12: The Oravitz home at 141 Rustic Ridge Drive explodes, igniting fires that destroy the neighboring houses on either side. Initial reports are that four were killed, three were taken to hospitals and one was unaccounted for.
• Aug. 13: The death toll rises to five, including a child, with family confirming two are Casey Clontz and his son, Keegan.
• Aug. 15: Borough officials and family identify the remaining victims as Heather Oravitz, Michael Thomas and Kevin Sebunia. Paul Oravitz is hospitalized in critical condition. A community gathering and memorial vigil is held for the victims. The Allegheny County Fire Marshal’s Office says it is aware that Paul and Heather Oravitz were having issues with a hot water tank and is investigating its role in the explosion. The state Public Utility Commission says its Safety Division is investigating if the public utility infrastructure or operations contributed.
• Aug. 16: The sixth victim, Paul Oravitz, dies at UPMC Mercy hospital. Peoples Gas restores natural gas service to the Rustic Ridge neighborhood.
• Aug. 17: Gov. Josh Shapiro orders the Department of Environmental Protection to launch an investigation.
• Aug. 18: State inspectors detect low levels of combustible gas in the area of the blast and were working to identify it and find its source.
• Aug. 19: “Prayers for Rustic Ridge” yard signs begin spreading throughout Plum and neighboring communities, one of many fundraisers launched to support affected residents.
• Aug. 21: DEP officials say Penneco reported finding a pinhole-sized leak in a 4-inch gas gathering line 300 to 350 feet behind the Oravitz, Thomas and Smith homes after the explosion.
• Aug. 22: The National Transportation Safety Board says it will not investigate based on preliminary information that the source of the blast was inside the house and not in an outside pipeline.
• Aug. 25: Olympus Energy donates 250 combination carbon monoxide and explosive gas alarms to Rustic Ridge residents.
• Sept. 8: The Allegheny County Fire Marshal’s Office says its on-scene investigation is done and that the point of origin for the explosion was within the Oravitz home. All findings confirm there were no factors outside the home that led to the explosion. DEP says detectable concentrations of combustible gas found throughout Rustic Ridge on Aug. 14 likely came from the explosion itself and were no longer detectable near the explosion site.
• Sept. 15: Kelly Sebunia, wife of Kevin Sebunia, and her daughter, Emily Brizee, express their frustration with their loss and the investigation. Sebunia questions that a faulty hot water tank was the cause and says gas was something her husband “didn’t mess with.”
• Oct. 11: Plum Council votes to change the name of Old Mine Road to Mike Thomas Way in memory of their former manager.
• Nov. 12: A TribLive report reveals that fire hydrants in Rustic Ridge cannot provide enough water for fighting a single fully engulfed house fire.
• Jan. 8: Plum Council honors Greg Renko, president of the Rustic Ridge Homeowners Association, for heroism on the day of the explosion and names David Soboslay, assistant to Mike Thomas, as the borough’s new manager.
• April 1: Allegheny County officials ask for the public’s help in identifying a man captured on a doorbell camera at the Oravitz home on Aug. 9. The man, whose name was not released, came forward and was interviewed. Officials say he was not suspected of any wrongdoing or connected to the explosion in any way.
• July 16: The state Public Utility Commission says there is no link between Peoples Gas services lines and the explosion. Its Safety Division closes its investigation.
Brian C. Rittmeyer is a TribLive staff writer. You can contact Brian via email at brittmeyer@triblive.com.
Sean Stipp is a Tribune-Review photographer. You can contact Shane via email at sstipp@triblive.com.
Louis B. Ruediger is a Tribune-Review photographer. You can contact Louis via email at lruediger@triblive.com.
Shane Dulap is a Tribune-Review photographer. You can contact Shane via email at sdunlap@triblive.com.
Rob Amen is a Tribune-Review Managing Editor. You can contact Rob via email at ramen@triblive.com.