The victims of a home explosion heard up to 12 miles away have been identified as an elderly couple who were set to celebrate their 65th wedding anniversary.
David and Helen Mitchell, 89 and 87, respectively, were killed in a Crescent Township home that exploded and became engulfed in flames on Tuesday morning. The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office named them the following day.
The couple who were married for more than 64 years lived next door to their daughter, who was with her grandchild at home when the blast occurred.
A local businessman, John Bundy, said he saw a woman emerge after all the windows in the back of her house were blown out.
‘She came out with a baby and sure enough, she was confused and that’s when she said, “My parents lived there,”‘ Bundy told the Daily Mail. ‘We went over to console her. It was a really hard thing to see.’
The explosion happened at 8.54am in the township in a suburb of northwest Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. First responders arrived within eight minutes and found ‘fire throughout the foundation’ of the house, according to Crescent Township Fire Department Chief Andrew Tomer.
Both victims inside the home were pronounced dead before 9.30am.
Bundy said a hill sits between his factory and the couple’s home, and that the explosion was so massive that his workers thought it had happened on site.
‘The force of that sound being that close, the best way to put it is it was like a sonic boom,’ he said.
‘It was what you’d picture – a huge bomb that blew everything to pieces.
‘One hundred yards away, there were 2x4s splintered and plywood in the trees. The best way to say it – it was like pick up sticks.’
Fire officials recovered propane tanks and a private natural gas well, but investigators have not determined the cause of the explosion.
It is the third fatal gas explosion in the county in 12 months.
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