The Oklahoma City Bombing, 20 Years After

This was the first spontaneous memorial.

This is what it looked like the first time I visited it.

Image from zforwebhosting.com

Someone said there was an explosion at the Federal Building.

The hydrologist had just hung up from a call to the Oklahoma State Water Resources Board. Their offices were across the street from the Alfred P. Murrah Building in downtown Oklahoma City.

We were in the Chickasha office of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Our office mapped flood plains throughout Oklahoma, tested soil, monitored biodiversity in the state’s wetlands – in general, we collected and provided information to other Federal agencies, to state and local agencies, and to private individuals and businesses. Chickasha is about 40 miles southwest of Oklahoma City, as the crow flies.

I lived just south of El Reno, Oklahoma, and drove the 30 miles to Chickasha four days a week. My husband and I conducted most of our business in Oklahoma City, 25 miles east of our home. We banked at the Federal Employees’ Credit Union located in the Federal Building. My husband was a newly minted Veterinarian with Canadian Valley Animal Clinic in El Reno.

I give you all these miles and locations so you can see how we relate to what happened in Oklahoma City that 19th day of April, twenty years ago.

Connections between Federal Agencies and State and Local Agencies are numerous and intricate throughout the United States. Consequently, although we don’t know everybody in Federal service, we all know somebody in most parts of the country. And because in Oklahoma time and distance feels different from back east or out west, if you’re within about forty miles of Oklahoma City, it’s all the same neighborhood.

That morning in our office, we called our State Office in Stillwater. We turned on radios. We tried to call people we knew in the Federal Building. We were all trying to find out what happened.

Then someone heard it was a bomb. Speculation went through the office. Someone might have been mad at the Social Security Administration. They had an office in the Federal Building. Where were the FBI offices? No, it couldn’t be them. They had an office at 50 Penn Place, not downtown. (I’d gone there to get my fingerprints done when I first took a job with the Ag Department.)

How could someone have gotten a bomb into the building? In a brief case? A package sent to some poor soul working there?

Then someone brought a television in and we saw pictures. Very early pictures from news helicopters flying in the area.

My God. The whole front of the building was gone.

We couldn’t believe it had been a bomb. It had to have been a huge natural gas leak. What kind of bomb could do that?

What was I looking at on that television screen? The credit union was on the third floor toward the 5th Street side of the building. That part of the building was gone.

The day care? Two weeks before I had taken my daughter with me to the credit union. As we always did, we parked under the building. We got there just as the day care kids were coming back from some outing. They were in eight- or ten-seat strollers, three of them. It looked like a train coming into the underground parking. My daughter who was five watched all those children being wheeled in those long strollers. She was amazed. I’d never seen industrial-sized strollers either. But I could see how much safer that was than trying to get all those little kids holding hands, two-by-two, safely along the sidewalks in downtown traffic.

The day care was gone, too. Where were those children we’d seen two weeks before? I hoped  they were somewhere safe in their strollers far from that smoking shell of a building.

I tried to call my friends Arlanna and Renee. They worked for HUD (Housing and Urban Development) on the seventh floor. I looked hard at the pictures on the television. Tried to count the floors. It looked like HUD was gone, too.

This was before cell phones. Our only hope to contact people was by land-line.

Emergency people were all over the place. Oklahoma has a long history of murderous tornadoes and had just completed the annual preparedness training. They had plans already in place that directed emergency personnel from all over the state to where they should go and to whom they should report for instructions. Medical people knew which hospitals to report to and what they’d be doing. This was before the term “first responders,” but fire departments, police departments, and hospital personnel from throughout the area responded to this disaster just like they had been trained to do and had practiced every year.

I stopped calling Arlanna at her work number and called her home. I watched the TV screen as people came out of the building hoping to see her. Hoping to see the other people I knew who worked there.

I finally got Arlanna at home. She’d just left the building to go to a doctor’s appointment when it happened. She heard the explosion and saw the smoke in her review mirror. She was at home calling workmates, watching the television, and making a list of the survivors as she reached them by phone or saw them outside the building. Renee was safe and unharmed.

My son had just completed the first course of EMT training. He was called out, but he wouldn’t be 21 for five months yet and couldn’t be certified until then, so he did not transport victims. He ran errands, delivered supplies, and just did whatever they asked him to like so many did who came to help.

That evening my husband and I watched the local news as they showed over and over again Dr. Brian Espe being assisted down a firetruck ladder out of the devastation that had been his office. He was the Area Veterinarian in charge of APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.) He lost seven of his ten employees.

HUD lost eighteen people. Eighteen children in the day care died. Twenty-one Credit Union employees died, including Claudette Meek. She helped us on numerous occasions including a loan to buy a pick-up truck.

Forty people in the Social Security Administration Office died that day. Two of those were Donna and Robert Luster. Ten years later I would go with my daughter’s high school class to visit the Memorial Museum. Carol Luster, one of the young people on that trip, was their daughter. That was my only visit to the museum.

There were a total of 168 identified victims of the bombing.

I’ve been to the Memorial three times. Once before it was a memorial, then with the school class, and the last time was when my husband ran his first marathon, The Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon is held every year as a remembrance for the people who died there.

This is the first time I’ve written about the bombing. My cousin’s wife blogged about it two days ago. You can read Debbie's post  here. And my daughter-in-law shared a blog post about it from Dan. Read Dan's post at  Science is OK.

Debbie’s piece got me to thinking about writing about that day. Dan’s piece inspired me to comment on his blog and that got me started writing about it. I ended my comment on Dan’s post with:

“That was a terrible day. So many of us lost so much. Maybe one of the greatest losses was the loss of the world as we understood it. A world where we in our unspectacular Oklahoma City were safe from that kind of hate and violence. But, you show that we gained a new world, one where we speak out against the senseless disaffection we humans can feel for each other. A world where we teach each other to respect differences. And, maybe best of all, a world where we show love every opportunity to those closest to us and too often overlooked by us. Maybe today's the day for me to write about it, too.

And today is the day.

Stay safe out there, wherever you are. Be kind to the people you meet and hug the people you love every chance you get.