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Five people died and three others were injured after a house explosion on a suburban street in Pennsylvania on Saturday spread flames to several nearby homes, shattering windows and causing walls to crumble, the authorities said.
The police responded to a report of a house explosion around 10 a.m. in Plum, a borough in Allegheny County in western Pennsylvania just east of Pittsburgh.
Three homes on Rustic Ridge Drive were leveled by the explosion, and about a dozen others were damaged, county officials said at a news conference Saturday night.
Lanny Conley, the chief of the Plum Borough Police Department, said at a news conference Sunday afternoon that four adults and one adolescent had died and been recovered from the scene.
He did not release the names or ages of the victims.
Steve Imbarlina, the assistant chief for Allegheny County emergency services, said that two of the injured people had been released from the hospital and a third was in critical condition on Sunday afternoon.
Emergency medical workers treated 57 firefighters for minor issues while they responded to the explosion and fire, Chief Imbarlina said.
“That could have been anything from a strain sprain to heat-related issues,” he said. “They were treated on scene and returned back to duty and re-entered the effort.”
Chief Imbarlina said that officials were investigating a cause for the explosion and that it would require extensive testing.
“This investigation may last for months, if not years,” he said.
Officials had shut off electricity and gas in the affected neighborhood “out of an abundance of caution” and were working to restore it, Chief Imbarlina said.
Michael Huwar, the president of Peoples Natural Gas, the company that provides gas service to the neighborhood, said its system was operating “as designed.”
He said that gas workers arrived in the neighborhood 15 minutes after they received an emergency call about the explosion and immediately began to check for leaks in the area.
Photos and videos of the scene showed a row of splintered homes emitting smoke. Firefighters walked through piles of wood and ash.
Officials said on Sunday that they did not know how many homes might have been affected.
“With an explosion like that, there is bound to be other collateral damage,” the president of the Plum Borough Council, Mike Doyle, said. “I was walking away yesterday and I saw a Jeep with a back window blown out, so it’s not just houses.”
In footage obtained by WTAE, a local news station, the explosion can be heard piercing the quiet of a nearby baseball game. In another clip, a doorbell camera appeared to capture the moment of the explosion, which sent a plume of fire and smoke into the sky.
George Emanuele, who lives three houses from where the explosion happened, said that he could feel the blast in his chest, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
He said that his house shook, parts of his ceiling fell and one of his garage doors bent and would not open when he tried to get out of the house. Mr. Emanuele said he was able to exit through another door and he and a neighbor pulled a burned man away from a house that was on fire.
“The house was gone,” Mr. Emanuele said. “It was just debris and soot everywhere.”
Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that his administration and the state’s emergency management agency were “coordinating with and supporting county and local emergency responders.”
Amanda Holpuch contributed reporting.
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