Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 20, 1995 TAG: 9504200097
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Dallas Morning News
DATELINE: OKLAHOMA CITY LENGTH: Medium
Triage centers were set up all around the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building to treat the wounded. Hundreds of doctors, nurses, medics and citizen volunteers reported to the bomb scene or to hospitals.
But as the day wore on, the horror of what had happened shortly after 9 a.m. Wednesday became clear: There simply weren't enough survivors for all the doctors and nurses to treat.
By noon, the only sounds rescuers in the building could hear were the ones made by other rescue workers, said Officer Adrian Neal of the Edmond Police Department. By 1:30 p.m., many of the medical personnel were being sent home.
``People from all the floors were just thrown down the middle like a rag doll,'' said Dr. D.S. Ahmad of Presbyterian Hospital. ``We don't need doctors and nurses. What we need are body bags.''
He said the building appeared to have been cratered from the inside out.
The bomb's almost unimaginable devastation brought some police officers and firefighters to tears as, together with civilian volunteers, they spent the day in a desperate search for life.
The initial focus of the rescue teams was the second-floor day-care center. ``Kids get you right in the heart,'' said Assistant Fire Chief Jon Hansen. ``We wanted badly to find those children alive.''
Rescue workers did find some children dazed and injured from flying glass and debris, but most of the children were unaccounted for by Wednesday evening.
Firefighters, in teams of four, were working for up to an hour at a time, Hansen said. He said that the higher the floor, the more unsteady it is. Some were split; others were pancaked onto lower floors. ``I'm real concerned about the risk of collapse,'' he said. ``The incoming storm does little to bolster my confidence.''
Many rescuers were working on floors that were swaying and crumbling beneath them, but Hansen said firefighters ``were not letting anything slow their search.'' He said the rescue effort would last into today and possibly into Friday.
The chief described the first 30 minutes after the bombing as ``pure mayhem.'' Streets were choked with walking wounded, emergency crews and well-meaning citizens, he said.
Some people apparently driving near the federal building at the time of the blast appeared to have been killed in their cars.
Inside the federal building, Hansen said, survivors were screaming and crying. ``We're having to crawl over victims to try and reach the living, and often all we can do is hold their hand,'' he said.
The Fire Department set up a critical-incident stress center staffed by mental-health officials to counsel the rescue crews.
William Baay, 39, was at home about five miles from downtown when the bomb went off. Bay works at a pizzeria near the federal building and said he went to check on his boss. He ran out of gas, however, and ran the last three miles, he said.
After arriving at the scene, he ``just drifted'' into the building to see if he could help and found himself assigned to a rescue team that went into the basement.
After a few minutes, Baay found a middle-aged woman named Dana, her ankle and shoulder pinned by concrete and steel beams. Baay said he had to crawl over several bodies and ``lift pieces of someone's chest off her to find her.''
The woman, whose last name he did not know, was lying in about 3 inches of dirty water. Baay said he worked for three hours trying to free her, using whatever equipment the firefighters could bring him to saw through, or chip away at, the debris that was pinning her. They gave him a breathing mask, but he said it got in his way, so he took it off.
``It took me an hour just to find her hand to hold it,'' Baay said. ``She wanted to know where her mother was, but I didn't see anybody else nearby.''
Baay said he did not believe that the woman and her mother worked at the building.
``We tried not to talk about the disaster,'' he said. ``All I wanted was for her to stay calm.''
He finally managed to free the woman's shoulder, but firefighters eventually made him leave so he could rest.
When he left, all he could do was ``find a curb to sit down and cry.''
``All I want to know is that she is OK,'' he said. ``I want to see her and talk to her and tell her how hard I tried. There's just not that many people left alive. You hate to treat bodies like rubble, but you've got to get around them to find the survivors. Unless you've been down there, there's no way to understand it.''
The woman later was freed.
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB