Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 18, 1995 TAG: 9505180062
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In the purple fluorescent glare of a tanning booth in Salem, Larry Payne lifted his black sunglasses and stared at the radio playing nearby.
It was April 19, and the 26-year-old native of Oklahoma had just heard about an explosion in Oklahoma City, near where he grew up. Payne got dressed and jumped into his car, heading toward his home in Roanoke.
By the time he pulled in the driveway, he'd heard the federal building had been bombed.
And then Payne realized that day was one of the two days a month his mother worked at the federal building filing bankruptcy papers.
His answering machine was full of messages, but none had any answers about his mother. He couldn't get through on the phone to Oklahoma City. All he could do was wait and look for his mother's face among the television photos of bloodied survivors fleeing the devastation.
Payne had just started a week's vacation from his job as dispatcher for an ambulance company. As he watched the television, he could think of only one thing: He would spend his holiday at his mother's funeral.
However, when the bomb went off, Harriet Payne wasn't in the federal building. She had just gone out to buy coffee and doughnuts for her co-workers, all of whom died in the explosion.
Even after learning - when he got through on the phone hours later - that his mother was OK, Payne felt he couldn't just stand still. The volunteer Roanoke County firefighter caught a plane to Oklahoma City and joined the rescuers.
Today in Richmond, Gov. George Allen will honor search-and-rescue teams from Fairfax and Virginia Beach who were sent to help at the explosion site. At the last minute, state officials found out about Payne and extended an invitation, but it was too late for him to attend.
Payne worked in the Oklahoma City federal building for most of a week and pulled out four of the people killed in the blast. He didn't find any survivors.
"I was not really prepared for every person we pulled out to be dead," Payne said. The first few days he was there, "They were telling us it was still possible we were going to find people alive."
He recalled his first moments at the bomb site. "It was just total devastation, a lot worse than what you see on the TV. As you started to walk through the six or seven blocks they had cordoned off, you saw all the windows and stores boarded up. There wasn't any glass in any of them.
"ATF and FBI agents were walking around with semiautomatic guns and shotguns. It looked like a war zone. It really did."
Payne sometimes spent up to 12 hours searching in the wreckage. "It was a lot of crawling. There were a lot of spaces a foot and a half tall and a couple feet wide, and you'd have to crawl in with just the helmet lights. The problem with that was, after 30 or 40 feet, you'd find a dead end, and you'd have to back all the way out and start over again.
"It was dusty. Very dusty," he said. "And the building would constantly shift and moan. The building would make moaning sounds. That's the best way I can describe it. When it did, you just stopped what you were doing. Even if you were holding a 50-pound piece of concrete, you just froze."
And then there were the psychological difficulties. Just as tough as finding a body could be finding the remnants of a person's life. "Every time you found a person, it was a different story. You asked yourself why this person was here. I found a dozen roses with a note attached to them and it said, `Happy Anniversary. I Love You.'
"One young lady we pulled out had an engagement ring on. It immediately made me think about what the young man is going through, what the family's going through who was planning a wedding for this woman."
When rescuers found bodies, they would get timeouts to go talk to psychologists. It helped them, Payne said, as they tried to cope with the extent of the tragedy.
"You had to push the bad feelings off to the side and continue with your work."
The thing that hit him the hardest, he said, was when a veteran Oklahoma firefighter emerged from the basement area of the building carrying a child's plastic tricycle.
"He fell to his knees and just started to cry uncontrollably," Payne said. "It really shocked me."
The brightest moment for Payne was a reminder of home. On the first day he arrived, Payne had seen the Virginia flag hung on a wall among other flags from the home states of rescuers.
On the third day, a Roanoke flag was hanging next to the Virginia flag.
"Someone from the Roanoke Valley sent that flag in. I never did find out who it was," Payne said. "I wish I could thank them. It made me feel very proud to be a part of Virginia and it made me very proud that people in the Roanoke Valley were thinking about me."
by CNB