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By Renata Ostrowski and Curtis Hoyle

Post-Gazette Staff Writers

Updated 11:48 a.m.

City and county officials on Monday flatly rejected the authenticity of cellphone videos circulating online that appear to show a large, misshapen figure moving through downtown Pittsburgh during Saturday night’s fatal gas explosion, calling the footage the work of AI generators and warning that sharing it interferes with the investigation.

“There was no creature,” Public Safety Director Alan Pryluck said at a morning briefing at the City-County Building. “There was a ruptured transmission main under Forbes Avenue. Thirty-four people are dead. I would ask everyone to think about those families before they hit repost.”

The death toll rose Monday from 29. Twelve people remain hospitalized, four in critical condition at UPMC Presbyterian. Peoples Natural Gas confirmed a “catastrophic failure” on a 24-inch line and said crews had isolated the segment by 3 a.m. Sunday. The company declined to say whether the line had been inspected in the last five years.

The videos began appearing on TikTok and X around 11:40 p.m. Saturday. The most widely shared clip runs 19 seconds, was apparently shot from a fifth-floor window on Wood Street, and shows what appears to be a mass of pale flesh, roughly the height of a delivery truck, crossing an intersection and pulling a parked sedan over on top of itself. Several other clips, shot at street level, are too dark and too unsteady to make out much beyond movement and screaming.

Post-Gazette reporters have not been able to verify any of the footage.

Dr. Amara Oyelaran, who studies synthetic media at Carnegie Mellon, reviewed four of the clips at the paper’s request and said the Wood Street video contains “the kind of temporal inconsistencies you’d expect from a diffusion model,” including shadows that fall in two directions and a fire hydrant that changes position between frames.

“It’s not a hard call,” she said. “That said, I want to be careful. People are going to take my quote and use it to explain away everything they saw, and I only looked at four videos out of what is now dozens.”

The FBI’s Pittsburgh field office said it is assisting with “the identification of coordinated inauthentic activity” around the incident. A spokeswoman would not say whether the bureau is investigating the explosion itself.

The official account has not satisfied everyone who was there.

Marisol Vega, 31, a bartender at a Market Square restaurant, said she was smoking behind the building when the noise started. She described a sound she could feel in her sternum, and then people coming up Forbes at a full run.

“They tell me it was a gas main,” Vega said. “Okay. Then why did I see a woman with her arm gone at the shoulder and no burns on her?”

The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office said preliminary autopsy results would not be released this week and declined to characterize the injuries. A spokesman said the delay was “a function of caseload.”

Two city firefighters who responded from the Second Ward station described damage on the 400 block of Wood Street that they said did not match a blast pattern. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to talk to reporters, and both said they had been instructed Sunday to route all questions to Public Safety. One of them mentioned a Chevrolet Malibu that had been folded roughly in half around a light pole. Peoples Natural Gas, asked about vehicle damage, referred questions to the city.

Mayor Deborah Kwan, who visited the site Sunday, spent much of Monday’s briefing on infrastructure. The city has 1,900 miles of gas distribution line, she said, some of it cast iron laid before the Second World War, and she called on the state Public Utility Commission to accelerate replacement.

Asked directly whether she had personally viewed the videos, Kwan said she had.

“I’ve seen them,” she said. “They’re not real. Next question.”

Downtown remains closed between Grant Street and Stanwix, with no timeline for reopening. National Guard engineers arrived Monday afternoon to assist with structural assessments, a deployment the governor’s office described as routine.