Allentown neighbors get a look at blast damage

ALLENTOWN - As bulldozers razed eight homes destroyed by a natural gas explosion that killed five people, residents living across the street were allowed back into their homes Friday for the first time.

Terry Elison said that even though her home was too damaged to live in, she had reason to be grateful.

"The windows are blown out, the doors are blown in, and the smell of smoke is unbearable," she said, pausing to control her emotions. "But I'm better off than my neighbors. I have a house to walk into, and a life."

The day saw an outpouring of donations from local businesses and people wanting to help the victims, and a visit by U.S. Sens. Bob Casey and Patrick Toomey, who toured the site with an eye for what authorities could be doing to inspect and repair aging infrastructure.

Within hours of his tour, Casey wrote to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, urging it to commit more staff and money to inspecting a system with more than 70,000 miles of pipe in Pennsylvania alone - much of it as much as a century old.

"I've never seen anything like that. It's a crater in the earth the size of two homes," Casey said moments after his tour. "It reminds us not only of the tragedy that happened there, but that there are consequences to allowing our underground infrastructure to deteriorate. We must take a closer look at this on the federal level."

By nightfall Friday, all eight homes damaged by the explosion and fire two nights earlier had been demolished, and authorities had begun trying to determine what caused the blast that killed William Hall, 79, and his wife, Beatrice, 74, and three members of a neighboring family, including their 4-month-old son.

Fire Chief Robert Scheirer said the blast almost certainly occurred inside the Halls' home, but what's left to determine is how natural gas apparently pooled inside.

Mayor Ed Pawlowski said the block would remain closed for two weeks while officials from the city, UGI Utilities, the state Public Utility Commission, and the National Transportation Safety Board investigated the explosion and replaced the gas line.