After a blast tore through a nursing home, killing a resident and an employee and triggering a frantic search of the wreckage, rescuers faced gunfire, falling debris, and the threat of more explosions to evacuate dozens of nursing home residents.
Officials stated on Wednesday that they had located everyone after hours of searching.
The police chief of Bristol Township said he had “never seen such heroism,” and a speech therapist working there described feeling the building shake during Tuesday’s blast and quickly wheeling out a bedridden resident, bed and all.
“They were running into a building where I could still smell gas from 50 feet away, and walls that seemed about to collapse,” Police Chief Charles Winik told reporters on Wednesday.
Responders spent hours digging through the severely damaged building and checking with hospitals late into Tuesday night to find the missing. But officials said they didn’t yet know the cause of the explosion, even though a utility crew had been on site investigating a reported gas leak.
The blast sent 20 others to hospitals, including one person in critical condition. The remaining 120 residents were transferred to nearby nursing homes, officials said.
The Bucks County coroner’s office said the employee who died was 52-year-old Muthoni Nduthu. Authorities didn’t immediately identify the resident who died at a Philadelphia hospital. Both victims were women.
Nduthu’s sister said she was a great mother to her sons, a great wife, a devout Catholic, and very involved in the community. A Kenyan immigrant, she attended nursing school, loved to cook, and was a hard worker, her sister, Rose Muema, said.
“She was an immigrant who came to make a difference in this country, and she did,” Muema said.
Winik said that 19 people were still hospitalized on Wednesday.
The explosion was so powerful that it shook nearby houses for blocks in Bristol, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) northeast of Philadelphia.
A wing of the facility with the kitchen and cafeteria was almost completely destroyed, with the roof caved in, sections of walls completely missing, and windows on adjoining walls blown out. Debris littered the grounds.
Winik said the scale of the casualties could have been much worse. Police and firefighters flooded in from the area, as staff from a neighboring hospital, nursing home employees, and neighbors rushed to help evacuate people. One person was resuscitated at a hospital, officials said.
Authorities said they found people trapped in stairways, elevator shafts, and under rubble. Some residents couldn’t walk, and some were in wheelchairs or bedridden. A second explosion occurred while the rescues were in progress.
Speech therapist Julia Szewczyk described the experience as terrifying and devastating.
She was in a group therapy session in another part of the building when it started to shake. She and other staff rushed to evacuate residents across the street to safety.
“And then the next thing was to go inside and grab more people,” 25-year-old Szewczyk said.
They dragged a bedridden resident into the cold, then Szewczyk ran back into the burning building twice to get blankets from a supply closet. One coworker got trapped inside an elevator when the power went out, she said.
Outside, during the rescue, employees had been looking for Nduthu, Szewczyk recalled.
Federal agencies were set to assist in the investigation, but the collapsed walls and roof needed to be cleared first, Winik said.
A utility crew was responding to reports of a gas odor when the explosion happened, authorities have said. The local gas utility, PECO, said the crew shut off natural gas and electric service to the facility, but didn’t know if utility equipment or gas was involved in the blast.
Musuline Watson, who said she was a certified nursing assistant at the facility, told WPVI-TV that staff smelled gas over the weekend but didn’t initially suspect a serious problem because there was no heat in that room. Other employees told Szewczyk they smelled gas earlier on Tuesday, Szewczyk said.
The nursing home recently became affiliated with Ohio-based Saber Healthcare Group, which called the explosion “devastating” and said in a statement that facility personnel promptly reported the gas odor to the local gas utility before the blast.
Willie Tye, who lives about a block away, said he was watching a basketball game when he heard a loud boom.
“I thought an airplane or something had come and fallen on my house,” he said.
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Levy and Scolforo reported from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Associated Press reporters Mingson Lau in Bristol, Pennsylvania; Holly Ramer in Concord, New Hampshire and Michael Casey in Boston contributed to this report.