If the explosion was the big wound, the weeks after brought a stream of salt grains aggravating the healing process. The quiet cul-de-sac turned into a high-traffic attraction.

A local environmental group came to document the destruction. Tom Demarco called the police on a man carrying a bag with a drone inside. For weeks, the street had a guard posted at the entrance.

It had been a decadeslong tradition on Ivy Lane to welcome fall with a block party. In 2018, on a day’s notice, the residents held a “safety meeting” instead. They assembled in one of the neighbors’ backyards over hot dogs and pop.

At the meeting, Ryan Boring took the lead.

A tall, intense-looking man often mistaken for a military veteran, he began with a loose mission statement about pushing for safeguards. But he could sense that people needed to vent first. He needed to vent, too.

The Borings hadn’t come home the night after the explosion. They stayed in a hotel paid for by Energy Transfer, but Ryan couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t get past the noises — the air system kicking on, the ice maker in the hallway. The family stayed for several days. Ryan’s youngest son kept asking when he could go home, but he didn’t want to sleep there. Just visit.

Other neighbors took turns telling their own evacuation stories. They compared notes about conversations with Matt Bearrow, the main Energy Transfer contact who had gone door to door in the days after the blast, handing out gift cards and the company’s hotline number.

The point of the meeting was to standardize expectations. But the difficult question wasn’t even what could they get from Energy Transfer. It was whether could they agree on what they wanted.

Barbara Goblick, whose house developed several large cracks in the plaster, suspected some of her neighbors were being unrealistic.

“There’s people who want them to come in and buy the whole neighborhood,” she said. “Well, a lot of us don’t want to sell.”

Neighbors talked freely about new anti-anxiety pills they’d started taking, but no one was eager to commit that to writing.

After a few hours, the central question about Energy Transfer — which Don Lehocky shorthanded as, “Do we want to develop something and go against them, somehow?” — was answered. They would try.

The group came up with a name, the “Ivy Lane Alliance,” which would later be changed to the “Ivy/Pine Alliance,” with the hopes of capturing neighbors on a side street.

Before they adjourned, one of the neighbors suggested there was one thing missing from their plans: Karen Gdula.

THE LETTER

Karen Gdula grew up at 730 Ivy Lane, the house she now shared with her new husband, Tom. She’d spent the bulk of her career as a project manager at MSA, the Cranberry-based company whose gas detectors firefighters waved in her house after the pipeline explosion. She was meticulous, friendly, retired and curious — in other words, a natural leader for the alliance. And she took to it with gusto.

By the time the group had scheduled its second meeting a month later, helicopter noise had become part of the soundtrack of Ivy Lane.

Energy Transfer helicopters surveyed the damage and lifted bags filled with pipeline fragments. Network helicopters provided video footage for the news. In two attempts that became an engineering sideshow in late October, a giant “sky crane” helicopter installed an electric transmission tower where the old one had collapsed in the fire.

Karen was recording all of it in her notebook — how on Sept. 17, two investigators from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection showed up unannounced asking questions about Energy Transfer’s contractors and previous landslides; how a week later, the pipeline firm sent a brochure titled “Facts about Pipeline Safety in Your Community.”

“Two homeowners count 13 curiosity seekers in 60 minutes,” she documented in one entry. “They turn around in our driveways.”

In early November, neighbors piled into Karen’s pink-carpeted living room, surrounded by needlepoints, uplifting messages, and a picture of Karen and Tom’s wedding a year before.

This was a strategy meeting.

Don Lehocky said he’d uncovered an alarming trend of safety violations on Energy Transfer projects. By this time, he was devoting at least an hour a day to researching the company, reposting anti-pipeline causes from across the country.

Ryan Boring had already reached out to some lawyers. He, Karen and Don — who had jokingly dubbed themselves “the generals” — drafted a letter to send to Energy Transfer.

If the neighbors voted to send it, Ryan’s would be the sole signature, he said.

“I said it to them and myself many times, ‘If we stand here and do nothing, and this happens in the next neighborhood and a 5-year-old girl gets killed, that’s gonna be on my conscience that I said nothing.’”

In the end, there was a paper to sign to secure people’s buy-in. It wasn’t legally binding, but more of a loyalty pledge. Most signed on the spot; a few others asked to think about it.

Ryan Curley was on the fence. Despite the drama that the explosion added to the birth of their third son, the Curleys didn’t feel as if they’d suffered.

The Rosatis lost everything, Amy Curley said. The Demarcos had the siding of their house blistered in the fire and were negotiating a buyout.

“When I was signing the thing to go to the gas company, I felt I was doing it more for them,” she said.

The letter was sent a few days later by certified mail. Energy Transfer didn’t respond by the deadline. When the Alliance extended the deadline, the company blew that one, too.

The lawyers that helped Ivy Lane residents compose their letter suggested the Alliance look elsewhere for legal representation. In the weeks that followed, the group found no one willing to take up their case. They had no physical damage, and they were not displaced. That they felt wronged made for a fuzzy legal argument, they were told.

The two families closest to the explosion were either gone or on the way out.

The Rosatis were living in a rental property in Hopewell while they searched for land big enough to care for their horses.

The Demarcos were in the process of negotiating an agreement that would allow Energy Transfer prolonged access to their land, and they were talking about a buyout. If that time came, the couple knew there would be a nondisclosure agreement attached.

The usually chatty Tom Demarco grew quiet.

NEW NEIGHBORS

In late October, environmental regulators forbade Energy Transfer from repairing the Revolution pipeline until the company could prove that it could stabilize the hillside behind Ivy Lane. The company couldn’t use heavy machinery on the right-of-way and was seeding the slope by dropping pellets from helicopters.

“Nothing like a Sunday before Christmas listening to helicopters,” Chuck Belzyk of 731 Ivy Lane fumed on Facebook.

That same week, a house sold on Ivy Lane — the first sale since the explosion. A renovated three-bedroom ranch on the corner of Ivy and Pine, about 2,000 feet from the landslide, sold for $236,000.

For a few weeks, it was the highest-valued property on the block. Then, in early January, Energy Transfer bought the Demarcos’ house and property for $360,000 and paid the Rosatis $400,000 for their charred land. The most valuable real estate on the street now belonged to the pipeline company.

The buzz in the neighborhood spread that Energy Transfer had bought the land to reroute the pipeline onto flatter ground, which would also bring it closer to the homes on Ivy Lane.

“I have to move,” Sue Michael declared after word of the sales became public.

For years, Sue — who directs operations a veterans clinic by day and tends to her mother in hospice during the evenings and weekends — has had a spreadsheet of her finances that spit out her retirement date: 2025. The 62-year-old was on track to pay off her house in two years, and, in the fall of 2018, she was getting ready to renovate the bathroom and a game room.

The explosion threw everything into limbo.

In her spreadsheet, she calculated that buying another house that meets all of her needs would push back retirement by about three years.

Energy Transfer’s inability to get the hillside to stop sliding was proving to be a mixed bag for the neighborhood. On the one hand, it was further eroding trust in the company’s environmental performance. On the other, it meant residents could go to sleep each night knowing there’s no high-pressure gas flowing below them.

Sue called it “my stay of execution.”

Ryan Boring was still having trouble sleeping, especially when it rained.

“I don’t want to be scared to live in my own house,” Ryan said one day in January 2019. “To me, that hillside is never gonna be shored up [enough].”

The Borings’ house on Ivy Lane seemed like a diamond in the rough when they first bought it. After a 13-year engagement, the couple tied the knot on the porch three years ago.

Since the explosion, Ryan’s wife, Heather, has been desperate to leave. When a fire burned inside a house in Aliquippa in January 2019, she called him in a panic asking if she should take the kids and leave. Evacuate, he said.

Just after New Year’s in 2019, Karen Gdula noticed new survey stakes with pink flags on the former Demarco and Rosati properties. This must be the new route of the Revolution, she thought. A few days later, another set of stakes appeared, with blue and white flags attached.

Another pipeline was coming.

Story by Anya Litvak: alitvak@post-gazette.com @AnyaLitvak

Photos and Videos by Andrew Rush arush@post-gazette.com @AndrewRush

PART 2:

BETWEEN

TWO

PIPELINES