Advertisement 'It was like looking into hell:' Natural gas explosion sparks large fire in Salem Township 1 injury confirmed, evacuations underway in area of Route 22 & Route 819 Share Shares Copy Link Copy

A natural gas explosion sparked a fire with huge flames Friday in Westmoreland County, leaving one person badly burned, causing damage to nearby utilities and prompting evacuations in the immediate area.Video: Watch the latest report from Ashlie Hardway"It looked like you were looking down into hell. As far across my windshield as I could see was just a massive fireball," said Forbes Road Fire Chief Bob Rosatti, describing his arrival at the blast scene near Route 22 and Route 819.Video: Watch the fire chief's news conferenceVideo: The explosion happened around 8:30 a.m. and involved a 30-inch pipeline owned by Texas Eastern, a unit of Spectra Energy, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. The blast caused flames to shoot above nearby treetops in the largely rural area.Sky 4 video showed a large swath of land around the pipeline that was scorched in the explosion. A nearby house was destroyed, and a man in the home suffered burns and had to be taken to a Pittsburgh hospital.The victim "told us that he heard a loud noise and compared it to a tornado. All he saw was fire and started running up the roadway and a passerby picked him up," Rosatti said."The heat was so intense that it was burning him as he was running," he said.A quarter-mile evacuation zone was established. Rosatti said the explosion and fire "damaged all the trees, all the utilities going down the roadway -- the phone, cable, electric. Burned all the telephone poles off. It kind of looks like a bomb went off."The cause of the blast wasn't immediately clear. Rosatti said nobody was believed to be working on the line when the explosion happened.Video: Sky 4 over the site of the pipeline explosion; looks like a battlefieldGallery: View the damage of the area around the pipeline from Sky 4"What caused that? That’s the biggest question. Everybody wants to know why," Rosatti said. "We have a lot of gas pipelines that run through Salem Township and a lot of the communities in Western PA have gas lines running underneath them, and this is a major concern for anybody."The U.S. Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration will lead an investigation into the cause of the explosion. They have jurisdiction because the gas transmission line crosses multiple states.The state DEP will investigate any impact on gas wells in the area and any environmental impact.The DEP had an inspector on scene Saturday morning. A spokesman for the DEP said everything in the area "looks okay," aside of minor damage to one monitoring well. The DEP is not directly involved in the Federal investigation.The pipeline is one of four parallel lines owned by Texas Eastern that run through the rural tract that Pete Rugh, 84, has called home his entire life."It scared the heck out of me. I heard this terrible roar. It shook to beat the devil," Rugh said."The noise was so great I couldn't hear anybody on the phone," he said. "The room where I was sitting turned orange. I thought the fire was closer to me than it was, so I grabbed my keys, got in my vehicle and got out of there."Lorrie Sherman-Miller lives in Slickville, about five miles from the site, and said she's used to hearing a "rumble" from the rushing sound of gas when crews perform maintenance."But the sound this morning was magnified 1,000 times," Sherman-Miller said.Sherman-Miller drove toward the site because she knows some people who live in the area, and parked at a BP gasoline station about a quarter mile from the fire to see it."As I drove to the site, the closer I got, the hotter it became. The sky and the flames were terrifying," she said. "When I pulled in to the BP it was so hot that I couldn't leave my window down. Steam was coming off the parking lot and the roads" which were damp from earlier rains.State route 819 will be closed until Monday. PennDOT posted a detour for drivers.Share photos & videos: Email to ulocal@wtae.com or tap the u local button on the WTAE app.10925658