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A natural gas explosion leveled a house on New York Avenue in Somerset, Massachusetts, on the evening of Feb. 19, 2009, killing 62-year-old Rose Marie Rebello and her dog, according to fire officials and a state investigation.

The Somerset Fire Department reported a strong smell of gas in the neighborhood at 5:16 p.m. and notified New England Gas Co., according to the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities. A company service technician reached the scene by about 5:40 p.m., followed ten minutes later by a supervisor and a second technician.

Crews checked several foundations with gas detectors and got negative readings, then knocked on doors at two homes, including Rebello's, and got no answer. Somerset Fire Chief Scott Jepson said the utility crew told firefighters who had been going door to door that the company had the situation under control and they could leave, since the leak appeared to be under the street and heavy digging equipment had been called in.

The crew did not shut off gas service to the area before the house exploded shortly after 6:15 p.m., about an hour after the initial report, Jepson said. The blast injured a firefighter and a utility worker and forced roughly 200 residents to evacuate.

Six homes were left uninhabitable and dozens more were damaged, with total losses estimated above $1.1 million. It was the third house explosion in Massachusetts in three months, following a fatal blast in Scituate in December 2008 and a serious injury in Gloucester the following month, and it drew renewed scrutiny of the state's aging gas pipeline network.

A Department of Public Utilities report issued Dec. 30, 2010, traced the leak to a roughly 50-inch crack in a two-inch steel gas main running beneath New York Avenue. Investigators found the pipe had likely been bent and its protective coating torn by a contractor installing sewer lines in the neighborhood back in 1974, more than three decades before the explosion. The report found no leak repairs had been logged on that stretch of main in the five years before the blast.

The department concluded the gas escaped through the damaged main, migrated underground and accumulated inside Rebello's home, where it was ignited by a source investigators were unable to determine. The report stated investigators could not establish the exact path the gas took from the street into the house.