Two people were killed Wednesday afternoon when a house exploded and caught fire near Route 28A in West Hurley, sending flames and debris into the surrounding woods and prompting a multi-agency emergency response across Ulster County.
The victims were identified by State Police as Ralph Brueckner, 75, of West Hurley, and Cheryl Hathaway, 58, of Poughkeepsie, both of whom died from injuries sustained in the blast.
The explosion, reported at approximately 12:36 p.m., leveled the residence and triggered brush fires in the area. Responding agencies included the West Hurley Fire Department, Empress EMS, and fire companies from Olive, Centerville-Cedar Grove, Sawkill, Lomontville, Hurley, and Woodstock, as well as the Ulster County Department of Emergency Services, the Sheriff’s Office, State Police, and the State Office of Fire Prevention and Control, according to information provided in a joint statement from Ulster County Department of Emergency Services, West Hurley Fire District, and the New York State Police.
The cause of the explosion remains under investigation by the New York State Police and the Ulster County Fire Investigation Unit.
Greg Meola, a first lieutenant with the Olive Fire Department, had just started to eat lunch at the Comeau Property in Woodstock when he heard the explosion.
“I didn’t know what it was. Just thought, huh? I wonder what that was,” he said. Then his pager went off: “House. Explosion. Fire. Possible entrapment.”
Meola drove 14 minutes to the scene with his gear in the truck—what firefighters call bunker gear.
“You always carry your stuff. We call it PPE, personal protective equipment. You got your boots and your pants. You kind of keep those together as one unit. And your coat. Your helmet.” he said.
By the time Meola arrived, his radio was already crackling: “The house is down. Heavy fire.”
He helped set up a drop tank at the base of the long, rural driveway, enabling engines to pump water uphill in the absence of hydrants.
“In a rural district, there’s no hydrants, so we have to shuttle water in,” Meola explained. “Tankers are shuttling 3,000 gallons of water each. They unload into the drop tank, then go back to a draft site—at West Hurley Spillway Road in this case—where another engine pumps water from a pond to refill them. It takes five minutes or so, and they just go around and around until the fire’s out.”
The blast was felt across the region.
Trina Dechant, 57, of Glenerie, was home on her day off, playing a video game with her cat in her lap when the sound hit.
“At first I thought it was my fiancé, or maybe the wind banging a door,” she said. “But that was not the house.”
Her daughter, in Red Hook—more than 20 miles away—heard it too.
Brush fires erupted quickly after the explosion, burning through dry leaf litter and woodland debris. Though the DEC had marked the Catskill Park region as “low” risk, the rest of Ulster County was already under a medium fire danger level, with a state burn ban in effect.
“The terrain and the litter in the woods—the leaf litter and the ground cover—is our biggest potential problem,” said Tim Pettet, a volunteer fire chief in Woodstock. He spoke to The Overlook before the explosion about the statewide burn ban will in effect until May 14. “On flat land it’s handwork, cutting a fire line down to the soil. On rocky terrain, fire runs faster uphill and wind can jump your lines.”
Pettet, who has been a volunteer firefighter for more than 40 years, said staffing remains a major challenge as the region changes.
“People are trying to balance training with their home life, and there’s not a lot of people working in town anymore,” he said.
Meola, who also works as a union grip in the film industry, says his response is guided by instinct.
“To me, some things are more important than making a movie or tiling someone’s kitchen,” he said.
Authorities said there is no ongoing threat to public safety, though roads in the area may remain closed.
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.
