Staff photo / Ed Runyan A National Transportation Safety Board investigator stands in front of the Realty Tower to begin field investigations of the May 28, 2024, explosion that destroyed the downtown building. Fire Chief Barry Finley, right, and fire investigator Chris Hodge accompanied her.

YOUNGSTOWN — Three days after a crew cleaning out unwanted pipes and other items in the basement of the Realty Tower downtown mistakenly cut an active natural-gas pipe, causing a devastating explosion that killed Chase Bank employee Akil Drake, many of the key players in the accident were questioned in an area hotel.

The National Transportation Safety Board announced May 29, 2024, that it was conducting an investigation into the explosion the day before to determine what went wrong and see if they could prevent such a tragedy from happening again. The next day, NTSB staff members were at the scene investigating the building.

About that same time, an NTSB investigative group started to interview people associated with the explosion at an area hotel. On May 31, they interviewed Brian Angelilli, owner of the Realty Tower and GreenHeart Companies, a Boardman general contractor.

He was a key part of the investigation because his general contracting company was responsible for the work being done in the Realty Tower basement that led to the explosion.

Angelilli explained the work in the basement stemmed from the city’s desire to have utilities moved out of the underground vaults in the public right of way adjacent to the Realty Tower and other downtown buildings. The city wanted the vaults abandoned and filled with a material such as gravel. It was part of the years-long SMART 2 downtown street improvement project.

Angelilli hired companies such as Fire Foe and Tactical Solutions to handle sprinkler-system and data-cabling in the basement / vault area. But he testified to the NTSB group that he hired a local man, Marcel Williams, and some helpers to remove pipes and other unwanted parts in the vault / basement area.

It was during that cleanup that Williams cut into a live natural gas pipe about 2:38 p.m. that caused the explosion. Investigative team members also interviewed Williams.

“And in regard to the gas line,” Angelilli started to explain to the panel, “I really didn’t … I didn’t award it. I wasn’t planning on doing anything with it,” he said of the natural gas pipe.

There were many questions posed to Angelilli about walk-throughs that Angelilli conducted in the basement of the Realty Tower in the months leading up to the explosion. The walk-throughs were done with various workers, contractors and officials to discuss the needed basement work.

Angelilli said that during those walk-throughs, the issue of the natural gas pipe “barely came up in conversation.” “To the best of my knowledge — I don’t know who said it — but somebody said ‘Yea, this is, you know, a dead line,'” Angelilli said of the natural gas line. It was no longer serving any purpose in the building, but was still pressurized with natural gas, officials concluded after the explosion.

TWO AREAS OF INVESTIGATION

The NTSB investigation looked in two directions from the start, with NTSB board member Tom Chapman saying at a May 29, 2024, press conference in Boardman that the investigation was going to look at “third-party work in the vicinity of gas lines,” such as Williams and his crew, and try to find out why an “abandoned” gas line in the basement was still “pressurized.”

Last week, the NTSB placed more than 50 documents from its investigation of the explosion on its website, including a transcription of the interviews the investigative group conducted with Angelilli, Williams and other people.

But also relevant was the recent release of documents in Mahoning County Probate Court showing that a civil suit filed by Drake’s family resulted in Angelilli and his companies, Yo Properties 47 LLC, LY Property Management LLC and Greenheart Companies LLC, paying $3 million in a settlement, and several Enbridge-East Ohio Gas-Dominion-related companies paying $2.9 million.

The Canfield architectural firm of A. Nieder Architecture and the MS Consultants engineering firm of Youngstown agreed to pay $100,000 each, the documents state.

An earlier story reported on an NTSB document called a “Pipeline Operations” review that quotes from East Ohio Gas Co. / Dominion Energy documents stating inaccurately that the gas line that caused the explosion had been manually cut and abandoned on Sept. 11, 2015.

REALTY OWNER ANGELILLI

During Angelilli’s questioning, he said he had owned the Realty Tower since about 2017. And in the years since, he has known that the gas service to the building was in the back of the building, not in the basement where the gas line was located.

He said he had seen “this thing hanging off this wall” over the years “with not much thought to it. I mean, it … was just old and hanging down. So the cleanup was, in my mind, was taking off some of the hangar (hardware) on the ceilings, anything that would get caught up” in the fill material that was going to be used in the vault area. He said he was out of town May 28 and learned of the explosion by phone.

When asked about walk-throughs, he said there were about three of them involving him and “different city personnel and / or architects and / or engineers.”

He said there was never any discussion regarding the gas line. He said one specific walk-through involved Chuck Shasho, deputy director of Youngstown public works; Annissa Neider, the architect involved with the vault work; and engineers he did not know.

For the Realty hearings, the “parties” were Stephen Jenner, an NTSB human-factors investigator; Kate West, director of gas operations for Enbridge Gas Ohio; Robert Fadley, a Public Utilities Commission director; Kim West, the NTSB investigator in charge of the the Realty investigation; and Angelilli’s attorney, Bryan Kidder.

When Jenner asked Angelilli if there is a 3-digit phone line to call when working with utilities, Angelilli said his employees call the utilities number “all the time, but you know, there was nothing there to locate because you could see what was there.” When Angelilli was asked if the project required a professional engineer, he said “Not that I’m aware of.”

When he was asked if his crews are working on something that involves an “active, pressurized pipeline, do they handle it or do you have to call in other folks?” Angelilli said, “if it’s active and we’re dealing with gas, we don’t normally get involved in that, you know, we usually put that on a plumbing contractor, you know. Had we known, you know, that would’ve been in my scope to have the plumber address it.”

When Angelilli was asked about Williams, he said, “I believe his background is in scrap,” adding that one of his employees would “utilize him to grab this or grab that and get it — you know, get it cleaned out.”

Angelilli said when he was notified of the explosion by phone, “I was kind of out of it for the next, I don’t know, I don’t really, I just don’t remember too much for the next hour or two.”

INTERVIEWER AND INTERVIEWEE

Ironically, one of the people asking the questions to Angelilli and others during the investigative hearing process was Kate West, director of gas operations for Enbridge Gas Ohio, who also later testified on behalf of Enbridge.

According to the NTSB website, when hearings are held, they are “fact-finding proceedings with no adverse parties and are not conducted for the purpose of determining the rights, liabilities or blame of any person or entity.”

It adds that at an investigative hearing, testimony is heard from witnesses that becomes part of the public record of the investigation. NTSB is authorized to compel testimony through use of a subpoena if necessary, it states.

For an investigative hearing, “parties to the proceeding” are designated by the NTSB to participate in the hearing, and a party “may be any person or organization with specialized knowledge that would contribute to the development of pertinent evidence,” the website states. At such hearings, “only NTSB investigative staff, NTSB board members and designated parties to the proceeding may ask questions of witnesses,” the website states.

The NTSB investigation is not yet complete, and there is a different body, the NTSB board, that deliberates over its final report in a public board meeting in Washington, D.C., the website states.

Kate West asked Angelilli if the “plans” the city and its architect provided to Angelilli for the vault project showed that “gas was in the basement at all.” Angelilli said he provided the documents to the NTSB. Kate West said a one-page document was provided.

She asked Angelilli: “And typically when you maybe do that type of work, do you … is someone telling you whether the gas line is active or abandoned or whatever — do you take their word for it?”

Angelilli responded, “This is a unique situation. I mean I’ve never really had a situation where I was dealing with a building that has a live service and an abandoned service.”

She asked for more specifics of who told Angelilli that the gas line did not have pressurized gas in it, and Angelilli responded, “I mean a group of people, you know, how you’re kind of moving to these projects, and people are talking and again, I mean I don’t think we spent more than a minute on it. I mean we literally passed by it.”

Angelilli said it was not his intention to have Williams cut anything except “hanging pieces that were extensions of the service and were all hacked off,” adding that they were “just hacked from some previous time.”

Kate West also was interviewed in her role as an Enbridge official by fellow panel members June 1, 2024. Her attorney also was present. Kate West said her job at Enbridge gives her a “primary focus over our field service employees.” Jenner asked her what she thinks “Enbridge’s role is in all of this.”

Kate West said, “Typically our involvement with these projects, once we are notified of any type of construction activity or even demolition of buildings, we’re contacted and typically we do some validation or verification of those facilities in the field to ensure, you know whether they’re active, energized or inactive and abandoned.”

If needed, Enbridge will “send a team out and they will investigate and ultimately, they could put a hole in it to ensure that it’s either a live or abandoned facility, specifically for a main line,” she said. She was asked who typically notifies Enbridge and responded that it could be a city and / or contractors or individuals.

When Jenner asked if Enbridge was contacted about the Realty project, she said the company was still reviewing information, but “at this point we are not finding any information that determines that anyone reached out to tell us about this project.”

Jenner asked if she would have expected a call “knowing what you know about this project,” and Kate West said she would have. “Based on their gas coming, you know, into the building, we would have expected someone to have done that original assessment of the utilities within the basement space, recognizing that there’s gas within that space and the reaching out to us to confirm that service line — whether it needed to be relocated, whether it, you know, is active or inactive.”

GREENHEART MANAGER

Also interviewed was Jim Carsone, superintendent of project management for GreenHeart, who said he walked through the Realty vault project area with Angelilli the first time two weeks before the explosion or less. Carsone said his role on May 28, 2024, was “a one-day job to organize the guys, meet them there at 7:30 in the morning, showed them the scope (of the project), left.”

He said he returned at 9 a.m. and spoke with someone in the Chase Bank on the first floor regarding water being shut off the following day, then left again to go to “other jobs.” He came back at 12:30 p.m., and it appeared the vault work was about done, he said. He left for another job and got a call from one of Williams’ helpers about the gas leak and called the gas company at 2:41 p.m. to tell them about it, Carsone said.

When Carsone was asked about what he observed and heard while he was in the vault area during a walk-through with Angelilli, Williams and others, he said there was “nothing about gas” discussed, and “I never seen the pipe that was pressurized.”

SCRAP REMOVER

When Williams was interviewed by the panel, he said of GreenHeart, “They don’t pay me. So whatever money I do get is from the metal.” He said he expected to earn “maybe a hundred bucks.”

He said Angelilli called him and asked him to go to the Realty Tower to remove two galvanized pipes. There were three other men there working in the basement-vault area during the time period just before he cut the gas line. The other men were working on other tasks or assisting him, Williams said.

He said Carsone “told us to cut the gas pipes. Supposed to be dead because I double-checked. I said, ‘Are you sure?’ He’s like, ‘Yea it’s dead, dead line,'” Williams said. He described Carsone as the “superintendent for that job.”

Jenner asked, “And while he was there (Carsone) told you that you’re going to be cutting those gas pipes?” Williams answered, “The gas pipes and the two galvanized,” Williams agreed.

Jenner asked why Williams asked Carsone if he was sure, and Williams said, “Well, I don’t like cutting anything. I’m real skeptical about that, especially gas pipe.” Williams said that just before the explosion, he cut two pieces of pipe. “But when I cut it the third, that’s when the — I told the guys to get the you- know-what out of the building. They went up the stairs,” Williams said.

When Williams got to the first floor, he pulled the fire alarm and told one of the other crew members to call the fire and police departments, he said.

When Jenner asked if there would have been any way for Williams to check the pipe to determine whether it had pressure in it, Willliams said no. “I am not a,” Williams started to say but apparently did not finish the sentence, causing Jenner to interject, “Above your pay grade, as we say,” Jenner asked.

“Exactly,” Williams agreed.

Williams expressed the opinion that the job should have had more supervision, “and not be somewhere else.” When asked who was in charge, Williams said, “I guess I was in charge.”

WORKER WHO LEFT

The NTSB panel interviewed 24-year GreenHeart employee Larry Wilson, who was in the basement vault area with Williams and the other workers May 28 but left about 2:30 p.m. Wilson was driving down Market Street when he got a call about the explosion.

Wilson told the panel that when he decided to leave, it appeared the work they were doing was done. He went to the area where Williams was and asked him if he was leaving also.

“And he said Jim (Carsone) wanted me to do a little more work down there. (Williams) didn’t specify, but he said there was a couple more things that he had left (to do) for Jim,” Wilson said. Wilson said he walked into the area where Williams was working at one point that day and saw what appeared to him to be natural-gas-related components.

Wilson said he went to the GreenHart offices in Boardman the next day for a meeting and saw Williams before the meeting. “I asked him what happened? He said, well I was cutting on the gas line because they said it was dead, and he was — they wanted him to take it down,” Wilson said, according to a transcript of Wilson’s interview.

“He said I hit — went through one, nothing happened, the second one, but he said when he started cutting the third one, he said that’s when everything went haywire,” Wilson said.

“And I didn’t know that’s what he was doing. I didn’t know he was told to be taking that down. The only thing that he had mentioned earlier was a — he had to take down some sprinkler-head water ones,” Wilson said, adding that if Williams would have told him about cutting down the gas line, “I would have told him not to do it.”

As the investigative panel did with other witnesses, they asked Wilson what he thought could be done to prevent this type of accident from happening again.

Wilson said that when he was in the military, they used a red-tag system in which a tag with the date and time, work that was being done was attached to a line or device that could potentially cause an accident. “If they leave something in any room, they red tag it,” he said. That alerts the next person, “Is this piece of equipment or something, is it hot? Is it dead?”

He said he thinks it is especially important in old buildings, adding “something might have been missed, you know, not said, and then or they forgot about it, and say yea, it’s shut off.”

Two of the other workers — Edward Bean and Taylor Botsford — were also interviewed by the NTSB panel. They said they worked for Williams and both had been released from prison within the past six months.

Bean said at one point, three big guys were running toward him telling him to get out of the building, so he went up the stairs and called 911, as Williams had asked. The 911 call taker asked Bean if it was gas or natural gas, so Bean asked Williams. “I told the operator yes, it’s natural gas and the fire department needed to come down here,” Bean said.