Shock gripped Blanche Heidengren on Tuesday morning when she learned in a group text that her prayer circle was seeking divine help for longtime friend Ann Matey.
A house had exploded on Matey’s street, Riverview Road in Crescent, right next door to the log-cabin home of Matey’s parents, David Mitchell, a township planning commissioner, and his wife, Helen Mitchell.
When Heidengren finally got in touch with Matey, relief flooded through her. But that cheer quickly turned to heartbreak.
The home that had detonated with a body-jolting boom that reverberated for miles belonged to the Mitchells.
Matey’s parents, both in their late 80s, were killed in the devastating blast shortly before 9 a.m.
Helen Mitchell, 87, died at 9:16 a.m. and David L. Mitchell Jr., 89, died at 9:29 a.m., according to the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office.
“I just burst into tears,” Heidengren said. “I was just in that home in November. A beautiful home and a beautiful couple.”
Within minutes, emergency responders began flooding the cul-de-sac in the Ohio River community of fewer than 2,500 people.
The catastrophic explosion obliterated the Mitchells’ home, scattering debris across the tiny neighborhood and shattering the peace of a warm, sunny winter’s day.
“It’s debris everywhere,” Cort Matey, the Mitchell’s son-in-law, said shortly after the explosion, before word of the victims’ identity began circulating among neighbors.
Bits of the Mitchells’ house — black scraps that looked like insulation — were hanging 20 or 30 feet off the ground in the branches of nearby trees. The debris ringed the crater where the house once stood.
Pieces of the couple’s mail and printouts of emails with their names and contact information were scattered across their lawn and roadway, near yellow police tape.
“It was complete devastation when we arrived on the scene,” Crescent Fire Chief Andrew Tomer said during a media briefing at the Crescent municipal building on Spring Run Road. “One home, completely leveled.”
Two other homes were damaged, Tomer said.
Reports of an explosion came into 911 at 8:54 a.m.
Items shot off windowsills in the neighborhood, knocked pictures off walls and caused heavy furniture to shift. Reports of the blast came in from Coraopolis, Moon and Sewickley Heights.
Emergency responders arrived eight minutes later, finding a smoldering crater and the splintered remnants of a home at the end of Riverview Road, which opens to views of the river and an industrial development across the water in Leetsdale.
The blast, which ignited a fire on a nearby hillside, echoed and boomed on the other side of the Ohio River.
“We all felt and heard the explosion instantly,” Tomer said. “You felt it in your chest.”
Concerned people began showing up at the Robert Morris University police station to report the explosion — nearly five miles from the blast site.
“It almost felt like someone was jumping on the roof of the building,” RMU police Chief Jeff James said.
Some of Heidengren’s friends in Sewickley Heights had heard the explosion so clearly that they thought something had blown up in their own neighborhoods.
Heidengren said that the force of the blast blew out the windows of Matey’s home. Matey ran outside holding her grandchild to see what happened and was met with the wreckage of her parents’ home, said Heidengren, who learned the details from someone else in the prayer circle.
“Our whole (Bible study) group is standing by to help her in any way we can,” she said.
The Mitchells lived in a single-level log cabin that was built in 2009 and sat on 2.1 acres, property records showed.
Each year, the couple would host a “Pie Day” the day before Thanksgiving, a ritual that drew family and friends to make pies, Heidengren said.
“We would just walk in and call them ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad,’ she said.
Officials said they were just at the beginning stages of determining the cause of the explosion. They said there was a private natural gas well on the property and propane tanks at the home. But authorities would not speculate whether the well or the tanks played any role in the blast.
The county fire marshal is leading the investigation. If recent history is a guide, there won’t be any quick answers.
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Tuesday’s blast marked the third house explosion in the county in the past seven months, all under investigation by the fire marshal.
Exactly three months earlier, on Dec. 12, a cottage exploded in Sewickley Heights, injuring a plumber and destroying the structure.
And the Crescent explosion occurred seven months to the day since a massive detonation Aug. 12 in Plum’s Rustic Ridge neighborhood killed six people and destroyed or damaged 13 homes.
First responders were dispatched at 8:54 a.m. for reports of a house explosion at 1410 Riverview Road, according to audio of the 911 transmission. They found a large fire burning when they arrived.
George Chemsak lives in the first house on Riverview and was home at the time of the explosion.
“It really shook me up,” he said. “I never experienced a percussion, an explosion, like that.”
He called it incredible.
“It didn’t just boom. It went for five seconds,” he said. “I thought a tree fell on our house.”
When Chemsak went outside, he saw smoke and debris falling.
He called 911, and once he got through, called his neighbor. They didn’t know if a plane crashed or something else.
Then he walked up the 20-foot wide, wooded, dead-end road that’s home to about a dozen houses.
“There was debris everywhere. Wood, furniture pieces in the trees.”
The fire didn’t last long, Chemsak said, because there wasn’t much left to burn.
The beautiful home he’d visited in years past, he said, was leveled.
“There was nothing left. It was a log home — beautiful — it was just gone.”
Allegheny County Emergency Services is assisting first responders in Crescent Township following a house explosion on the 1400 block of Riverview Road. This remains an active incident. The scene is in a remote location and we’re asking everyone to avoid the area in order to allow… pic.twitter.com/58WZuuPDow
— Allegheny County (@Allegheny_Co) March 12, 2024
Wayne Carson was working as a janitor at Sewickley Academy when the explosion happened about five miles away.
“It made the building shake — it sounded like somebody hit the building,” said Carson, 63, of Hopewell, Beaver County.
Carson, who didn’t know the Mitchells, stopped at the site of the explosion on his way home.
“I just wanted to come up and see the end result,” he said, as he walked away from the yellow police tape. “And it’s not good.”
Patti Kastriba, a 60-year resident of the street, lives two doors down from the Mitchells. She was across the river babysitting at the time, but her fiance was home.
He told her that the explosion knocked pictures off their walls and moved a heavy desk several inches.
Patty Christian, who is in Florida, got a call from her husband Tuesday morning about the explosion.
They own a building on Riverview Road they use for his business.
A co-worker was there and said he felt the building starting to shake and then saw smoke.
By late afternoon, police had taped off the Mitchells’ house. Family outside told officials that they wouldn’t be speaking at this time
Others, though, were willing.
James Koepfinger met Dave Mitchell after moving to Crescent’s Wireton section around 15 years ago.
“I got to know him on the planning commission,” Koepfinger said Tuesday. “He was a super guy.”
Mitchell also volunteered for the Crescent-Shousetown Area Historical Association, Koepfinger said.
He was reluctant to say much more. And by nightfall, a uniformed Crescent police officer stationed on Riverview Road in a marked car made sure there would be no more interviews with neighbors. He turned away anyone who wasn’t a resident, saying he was acting on the chief’s orders.