YOUNGSTOWN — A woman who says she barely escaped the May 2024 Realty Tower explosion is now suing the companies many blame for the deadly blast.

Online court documents show that Ashia Simmons, formerly a resident of the now demolished building, currently residing in Georgia, filed suit in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court on Friday against East Ohio Gas Company (now Enbridge) and Greenheart Companies LLC.

Simmons, along with Alphonso Simmons and “A.S., a minor” are listed as the plaintiffs. The lawsuit asserts that as a result of the explosion, the family lost their home and countless personal belongings; incurred lost wages; were periodically separated as a family and had to live apart in order to meet their financial burdens; incurred health care costs mainly tied to trauma counseling; and experienced, physical, emotional and psychological damages.

The document states that Simmons and her child were at home on the day of the explosion, while Alphonso Simmons was at work. When Simmons learned of an emergency in the building, she hurried down a staircase and exited the building “only moments before the natural gas explosion” destroyed much of the building and rendered the rest uninhabitable.

Demolition work on the building began in June 2024 and was completed by the end of September of that year. Residents were unable to retrieve many of their belongings.

The lawsuit does not cite a specific amount sought by the plaintiffs, but asks for compensatory and general damages “within an amount within the jurisdiction of this court to be determined by the jury.”

Enbridge/East Ohio Gas owned the infrastructure that Greenheart crews were working around in May 2024, when the disaster occurred. The City of Youngstown had hired Greenheart to clean out and fill underground vault areas near the building amid infrastructure and road improvement prep work.

On May 28, 2024, while a Greenheart crew was removing old debris, pipes and utility material from the basement/vault spaces beneath the sidewalk near the building, workers cut into what they believed was an inactive, abandoned steel gas service line. The cut released natural gas into the building, and about six minutes later, Realty Tower exploded, wounding many and killing Chase Bank employee Akil Drake, 27.

An NTSB report stated that 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.

In July, Mahoning County Probate Judge Robert Rusu signed off on a $6.1 million settlement that held liable: Yo Properties 47 LLC, LY Property Management LLC, and Greenheart Companies LLC, for $3 million and the Enbridge-East Ohio Gas-Dominion-related companies, $2.9 million. A. Nieder Architecture and MS Consultants agreed to pay $100,000 each.

Similar to the allegations in that suit, the Simmons lawsuit alleges that Enbridge and/or Greenheart failed to: properly disconnect and deactivate a natural gas line to ensure that valves associated with that line were closed; to maintain accurate and reliable records about the service line; to properly locate and mark service lines in response to location requests; to provide accurate or complete information about an existing active gas line; to warn contractors of its existence; to act in accordance with applicable industry standards and safety regulations; other unknown actions.