Fire marshal finds no signs to link 5 Plum house explosions

Allegheny County’s top emergency management official confirmed Thursday that investigators have not uncovered any links among five house explosions in Plum since the mid-1990s, including the one Saturday that killed six people and decimated part of a subdivision.

Emergency Services Chief Matt Brown, who is also the county fire marshal, said that his office “has not seen any sign of these events being of a single source or of the same cause or origin.”

Brown’s comments echoed what the Tribune-Review had already reported Wednesday based on interviews with a 48-year veteran volunteer fire chief in Plum and a Peoples natural gas company spokesman.

Chief James Sims of the Holiday Park Volunteer Fire Department said that he had responded to five house explosions in the sprawling borough since roughly 1995, and each had a different, unrelated cause.

Nick Paradise, a spokesman for Peoples, which provides natural gas service in Plum, also said the utility had not detected any relationship among the blasts.

The most recent explosion, which occurred Saturday morning in the Rustic Ridge neighborhood, remains under investigation by the fire marshal’s office.

Officials have said that they are looking into reports of a problem with a hot water tank at a residence on Rustic Ridge Drive owned by Paul and Heather Oravitz, both of whom died.

Their house exploded in a massive fireball, pumping thick smoke into the air and shaking homes a mile away. Four neighbors who were inside the Oravitz residence were also killed: Plum Borough Manager Michael Thomas, 57; Casey Clontz, 38; his son, Keegan, 12; and Kevin Sebunia, 55.

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Even as investigators try to determine what happened on Rustic Ridge Drive, they continue to seek the cause of the explosion on Hialeah Drive in April 2022 that caused minor injuries but totaled the home there.

It remains an open case.

The fire marshal’s office is not sharing details about the investigation, and Sims would say only, “They have some thoughts on what occurred there.”

Whatever occurred, Sims said it was not connected to Rustic Ridge or any of the other detonations in the borough.

In 2008, an explosion on Mardi Gras drive was linked by the National Transportation Safety Board to sewer pipe work done five years earlier that damaged a gas pipeline.

And in the mid-1990s, there were explosions at two other homes within a year or so of each other, one due to a suicide attempt and the other to a gas leak, according to Amie Downs, the county’s spokeswoman.

Asked Wednesday afternoon whether anything linked the house explosions together, Downs said that because the blasts on Rustic Ridge and Hialeah remained under investigation, “we would not be able to point to any common denominators.”

When pressed, Downs wrote that the fire marshal’s office “has no further information to share at this time, period. Their work is underway on this case and when we have additional detail to share, we will do so.”

No one responded to voicemail messages left on the phones of Brown and Donald Brucker, his chief deputy fire marshal.

After midnight, Downs forwarded an email with a comment from Brown.

Asked Thursday why a response took so long, Downs said, “Because that’s when I received the response. Chief has been out at Plum hours and hours each day.”

Sims, a longtime Plum resident, said Wednesday that he understood why his neighbors would wonder whether something was wrong in their community, considering the bizarre history of house explosions in a borough that sits atop old mines and is pocked with active gas wells.