‘Never seen such heroism’: Christmas Eve bravery on display as rescuers rush into burning nursing home that rocked Pa. city for miles around

Rescuers braved shooting flames, falling debris and the threat of more explosions to evacuate dozens of nursing home residents after a blast ripped through a Pennsylvania facility, killing a resident and an employee, and setting off a frantic search of the wreckage.

Officials said Wednesday they’d located everybody after hours of looking.

The police chief of Bristol Township said he’d “never seen such heroism,” and a speech therapist working there described feeling the building shake in Tuesday’s blast and hurriedly wheeling out a bed-bound resident, bed and all.

“They were running into a building that I could — from 50 feet away — could still smell gas, and walls that looked like they were going to fall down,” Police Chief Charles Winik told reporters Wednesday.

Responders spent hours digging through the badly damaged building and checking with hospitals into the night Tuesday to locate 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 rest of the 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 went to 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 that,” Muema said.

Nineteen people were still hospitalized Wednesday, Winik said.

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 entirely destroyed, leaving 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 hospital next door, nursing home employees and neighbors rushed to help evacuate people. One person was resuscitated at a hospital, officials said.

They found people trapped in stairways and elevator shafts and under rubble, authorities said. Some residents couldn’t walk, and some were in wheelchairs or bed-bound. A second explosion happed as rescues were underway.

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 began to shake. She and other staff rushed to evacuate residents across a street to safety.

“And then the next thing was, to go inside and grab more people,” Szewczyk, 25, said.

They dragged out a bed-bound resident into the cold, then Szewczyk ran back into the burning building twice to grab 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 did not initially suspect a serious problem because there was no heat in that room. Other employees told Szewczyk they smelled gas earlier in the day 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 came and fell 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.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com