YOUNGSTOWN — City officials filed a lawsuit against the companies blamed for the deadly May 2024 explosion at the former Realty Tower in downtown.

The city filed the lawsuit in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court on Wednesday, the day before today’s two-year anniversary of the disaster and right before the statute of limitations expired.

The lawsuit was filed against Enbridge Gas Co., its parent company and numerous subsidiaries and sister companies as well as Yo Properties 47 LLC, which owned the East Federal Street building; LY Property Management LLC, which managed the building; and GreenHeart Companies LLC, which did the work that resulted in the explosion.

The lawsuit, filed by Robert Buch, a city senior assistant law director, described the May 28, 2024, incident as a “catastrophic natural gas explosion.”

Buch wrote: “The explosion caused destruction of public and private property, interruption of municipal operations, emergency-response expenditures, infrastructure damage, economic harm and substantial public nuisance conditions within the city of Youngstown.”

The city alleged two counts of negligence against Enbridge and its companies and two counts against Yo Properties, LY Property and GreenHeart.

Andy Resnick, the city’s spokesman, said: “This complaint was filed following a review of the facts and the significant impact this preventable event had on city operations, businesses and residents. This administration’s priority is to make sure Youngstown recovers fully and that we hold the responsible parties accountable — a necessary step toward rebuilding trust and preventing something like this from ever happening again.”

A four-person scrap-metal crew, engaged by GreenHeart — owned by Brian Angelili, managing partner of YO Properties 47 — was working in a basement area underneath the 13-story building’s sidewalk removing old utility lines when a crew member sawed three times into a pipe mistakenly believing it to not have natural gas in it.

The explosion killed Akil Drake, who was working at the Chase Bank branch on the building’s ground floor, and injured several others.

A National Transportation Safety Board report stated the line appeared old and rusted, lacked any markings indicating it was active, and had not been marked by utility locators as pressurized gas infrastructure. The NTSB report stated the Enbridge defendants incorrectly documented the gas line as abandoned and inactive.

The explosion and its aftermath have resulted in numerous lawsuits, with Drake’s family settling a case for $6.1 million in July against the companies and others.

The Youngstown Board of Control hired GreenHeart for $140,133 on April 19, 2024, without seeking bids, to handle the utility line relocation at Realty because Angelili owned the building and the company, which does construction, and thought it would be easier for GreenHeart to do the job, Charles Shasho, the city’s deputy director of public works, said shortly after the explosion.

The explosion caused the evacuation of all 23 apartments at Realty Tower on the city’s Central Square with those tenants leaving their belongings behind, never to return to their homes.

The city also ordered the immediate closing of the Stambaugh Building, which houses the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel and a restaurant, on the day of the explosion because of the danger posed by the heavily-damaged Realty Tower.

International Towers, which has about 170 tenants, was evacuated June 14, 2024, four days after Youngstown city officials got a structural engineering report stating all buildings within a 210-foot radius of Realty Tower should be closed because they’re in a “collapse zone.”

Shortly after Aug. 19, 2024, the hotel reopened and International Towers tenants returned home.

The demolition project was completed Sept. 25, 2024, almost 12 weeks after it started and twice as long as expected.

Because of extensive damage caused by the explosion and the subsequent demolition of Realty, Market Street in front of the site and East Federal Street from Market to Champion streets, which is between the former Realty Tower and Stambaugh Building, were closed for several months.

It wasn’t until early December that the section of East Federal Street reopened.

The city paid about $700,000 for work to the two streets, including repairing the roads, sidewalks, utilities, curb ramps, catch basins, landscaping and electrical upgrades.