THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 22, 1995 TAG: 9504220287
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: Oklahoma City Bombing
SOURCE: BY MIKE MATHER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: OKLAHOMA CITY LENGTH: Long : 113 lines
Despite all the gear available, from heavy earth-moving equipment to ultrasensitive listening devices, it all came down to the most basic tool Thursday as rescue crews from Hampton Roads dug into hell.
They used their hands. And they saw, smelled and felt death. Again. And again. And again.
``I have never been in a war,'' said Duane Krohn, a 34-year-old Virginia Beach firefighter. ``But I imagine it would look like this.''
Initially buoyed by reports that another rescue team had earlier found a survivor, Virginia Task Force 2 - activated just 24 hours earlier - entered the twisted wreckage of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building at 10 p.m. Thursday.
They hoped to bring out the next miracle.
Optimism plummeted as quickly as the temperature, however, as they worked on this cold, clear night digging in what was once a modern building.
``We reached the point - the conclusion - that there would not be viable victims anymore,'' said Chief Jim Kellam of Virginia Beach. ``It was very depressing.''
When a terrorist's bomb wrecked the federal building here Wednesday, Virginia Beach fire Capt. Terri McAndrews suspected the closest he would get to the scene was his television set.
As a member of the region's 56-member search and rescue crew, he was soon placed on standby with fellow firefighters, rescue workers and search-dog handlers. But alerts like that have become routine. After all, three times in as many years, the team has readied to respond to a variety of natural disasters nationwide, only to be told to stand down. They watched as other mobile Federal Emergency Management Agency crews got the go-ahead.
Despite stockpiling $200,000 of specialized rescue equipment and logging thousands of training hours to become one of FEMA's elite urban search-and-rescue crews, the Virginia Task Force - made up of firefighters from Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Chesapeake, Newport News and the Navy - had never actually gone anywhere outside the state.
``We've had so many false starts,'' McAndrews said. ``I hesitated when we were put on alert this time. I didn't think we were going to go.''
That changed about midnight Wednesday when ``stand by'' became ``move out.'' And 24 hours later, McAndrews and the rest of Virginia Task Force 2 stood at the rubble-strewn base of a building, the sight of which is now etched in the nation's conscience.
Then the crew descended.
The truck bomb blast had sheered through the building's north side. Nine floors of concrete and steel rained into the multilevel basement, bringing with it the bodies of many of the 150 people who were listed as missing and feared dead.
The Virginia team found many of them and dutifully marked each for removal. People who had once had hopes, dreams and lives were now just numbers. And as the rest of the world was told that the death toll was climbing, the Hampton Roads crew knew all too well how much higher it would yet go.
Although a portion of the team worked in Petersburg two years ago when a tornado ripped through a department store, this was the squad's first experience with catastrophe on this scale.
``They told us we may encounter lots of fatalities and hopefully, we'd encounter live victims. Mainly, they prepared us to encounter bodies and body fluids,'' McAndrews said. ``The psychology of it affects you most definitely. your family.''
The search was grim and grueling and painfully slow. Despite more than eight hours of work, the team cleared a section only about the size of a standard living room. Firefighters lost count of how many bodies they marked.
``This is totally different than what we are used to,'' said Newport News firefighter David Layman. ``We're being very cautious and very tedious. You make sure we don't make a wrong move.''
Krohn added: ``A quick move is a false move.''
The building's second-floor day-care center was just yards from where investigators believe the explosive-packed truck was parked. More than a dozen of the dead recovered from the building so far have been children.
Some of the Virginians had that on their mind as they worked.
``A lot of us are parents, and it was hard to cope with the nursery,'' Krohn said. ``The whole night I kept saying, `Please don't let me find anything. Please, don't let me find anything.' ''
Although armed with high-powered, concrete-chewing equipment, on their first search they could only manhandle rubble. They tossed aside softball-size chunks of concrete and gathered bucketfuls of pea-size debris.
They snaked tiny video cameras into gaps looking for life. And every few minutes four search dogs assigned to the task force sniffed for death.
They always found it. Indeed, the smells almost overwhelmed the dogs, said search manager Susie Audibert of Gordonsville.
Like water trickling around rocks in a stream, scents from bodies wafted through the rubble. When dogs found debris-shrouded bodies, the location was marked. But finding most of the bodies took little searching, she said.
Shortly before dawn Friday, the team withdrew.
In a cavernous downtown convention hall, some team members grabbed cold cans of beer from five-gallon buckets. They sipped and unwound, too tired to sleep. Others found sleep as they snoozed in a small banquet room amid the bustle of other search teams readying to move out.
And like the rest of the nation, they wondered at what could prompt any human being to a such a monstrous act.
``How could somebody do this? How?'' asked Chief Melvin Mathias, a Virginia Beach fire supervisor. ``You can't begin to comprehend the damage. Everywhere you look, there's damage.''
By 9 a.m. Friday, most of the firefighters were asleep, resting for the next shift, which begin around 6:30 p.m. The team will probably remain here until at least Monday. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Paul Aikn, Staff
Dennis Clark, left, an engineer with Virginia Task Force 2, studies
plans of the building with Jim Torrey of Portsmouth, center.
KEYWORDS: DISASTER BOMBING SEARCH AND RESCUE by CNB