The fireball that hit the Murrah Building seven-thousandths of a second after detonation put 1,000 pounds of pressure on every square inch of the building’s surface. It lifted all nine floors upward, shearing off the connecting steel reinforcing bars (called “rebar”) and demolishing three of the building’s major support columns. In violent undulations, whole floors were ripped loose from their moorings. Then, yielding to gravity, the floors collapsed, sandwiching together and funneling thousands of tons of debris down toward a giant crater blasted out by the bomb.
A few minutes after the blast, a breeze lifted the smoke and dust, and sunlight flooded the groaning carcass that the Murrah Building had become. Within minutes, a rallying cry spread through the confusion: the child-care center. It was unspoken that those children were the highest priority for rescue. With sirens drowning out the crescendo of screams, rescuers by the hundreds began to arrive. They struggled into the jagged heaps of rubble, seeking America’s Kids on the second floor.
But soon they realized there was no child-care center. There was no second floor.
* * *
One of the first into the building was Det. Sgt. Don Hull of the Oklahoma City Police Department. He and fellow officers crawled through mazes of twisted rebar and shifting concrete slabs. The air was so thick with dust that rescuers—many of them, like Hull, dressed in business suits with no special equipment—were forced to take breaths as shallow as possible.
Early on, Hull saw a baby in the rubble he thought to be dead. A massive gash marked the side of its face, but there was no blood—and no movement. The baby’s arm was twisted around so grotesquely—nearly wrung off—that bone protruded from the bicep.
For some reason Hull stopped just a moment to pick up the dead baby and straighten out its arm. “I heard a huge gasp,” Hull says. “And blood burst from the wounds as if jostling the body somehow started the heart going.”
Hull pressed the infant against his chest, holding the mangled arm in place, and began crawling upward through the heavy rubble. He and his fellow officers had been handing off living victims in a sort of bucket-brigade to the outside. But Hull was afraid the baby’s arm would fall off if he did that. So he struggled on.
When the baby stopped gasping, Hull began to administer rudimentary CPR, breathing into the child’s mouth and nose. This happened twice on the way out. As Hull broke from the building and headed for the closest triage area, he found himself screaming over and over, “Breathe, baby, breathe!”
As he reached an ambulance, Hull saw a couple running toward him—the woman screaming that it was her baby in his arms. Hull swiveled away, not letting them see the child. “I couldn’t let them look,” he says. “It was too horrible. The baby probably wasn’t going to make it, and I didn’t want that to be the last sight they had.”
“Hold the arm tight!” he yelled to a paramedic, finally handing the baby off.
It was 9:30 a.m. and Hull, like so many others, would be there for hours—until he quit from exhaustion.
* * *
The initial response of local medical teams was as impressive as that of the police, fire and rescue units. Melissa Webster, a manager at an ambulance service, was at the scene with an ambulance 90 seconds after the blast. Fearing that her own trembling building was about to collapse, she had fled from her desk to the street and had seen the black smoke rising six blocks to the south. She and a colleague leapt into an ambulance with six other paramedics.
Within an hour, her paramedics—only one team of dozens—had sent more than 200 injured people to hospitals and managed to treat hundreds of others. By then, all the company’s ambulances had arrived, and they were loading as many as five injured people into each vehicle.
Eventually Melissa Webster came face to face with the worst dilemma to confront paramedics in triage. A young woman lay before her with terrible neck and head injuries. “She’s not breathing,” said one of Melissa’s associates. “You’ll have to call her,” meaning that Melissa needed to tag her as too far gone to help so they could move on to assisting people with better chances for survival.
Melissa felt for the woman’s pulse. She wasn’t breathing at all, but her heartbeat was strong. Melissa knew at that moment she could not “call” her. “Her pulse is as strong as mine,” she said. She would see that the woman was given a chance.
“Put her in the ambulance and get her on a ventilator,” Melissa told a colleague. She turned to minister to others. Quietly, a few days later, Melissa checked on the young woman she had refused to declare dead. The woman had horrendous injuries that would take months to heal. But she was alive and would get well.
* * *
Priscilla Salyers, an investigative assistant for the Customs Service located on the fifth floor, had been talking to her boss at 9:02 a.m. when a thunderous gale-force roar of wind whooshed past her head. Then silence. And blackness. Priscilla tried to move but could not. She sensed a tremendous pressure. Something seemed to be crushing her head.
I’m having a seizure, she thought. Is it a stroke? Am I paralyzed?
But her mind was too clear, she thought, to have had a stroke or heart attack. If I can just get my head up off my desk.
Nothing. Priscilla realized there was little she could move except for her left wrist and hand. Her mouth was filled with earthy-tasting powder. There was a powerful pressure on her head from something that seemed to be slowly crushing her skull.
She was face down with her rump higher than her head, which was twisted to her right. Her right arm was pinned under her and her left arm splayed outward. With the fingers of her left hand, Priscilla began trying to dig into the dirtlike substance of the powdered concrete. She also began to pray for God to give her the strength to survive.
Oddly, her most immediate annoyance was a piece of chewing gum in her mouth that had become an irritant. The gum was infused with a foul grit, and Priscilla desperately wanted to get rid of it. But her mouth and jaw were so tightly constricted that it was impossible for her to spit it out. It was all she could do to breathe.
About 30 minutes into her entombment, Priscilla heard the far-off voices of men. Then, suddenly, close by, she heard a man speak sharply: “Okay, this is the day-care center. We have a lot of children in here.”
Priscilla tried to speak, to scream, to let the man know she was there. But she couldn’t make her mouth work. Priscilla’s greatest terror was that the crushing pressure on her head was becoming greater and greater. She prayed for calm and wisdom, realizing that if the men began working on top of her it could push the pressure on her head to a breaking point. She also wondered why the men thought they were at the day-care center, three stories below her office.
But then the voices were gone. Eerie silence returned. Her breath was coming much faster now, and she began to feel sleepy: But I’ve got to pick up Josh at school, so I need to stay awake to do that. She fought the urge to sleep.
Priscilla had continued to rotate her left arm and hand. She prayed that her hand was visible and that she would be able to wave it if she again heard voices.
Suddenly, she heard a shout off to her left: “Hey! Here’s a live one!”
Then Priscilla felt someone take her left hand and hold it and rub it. Her muscles first went limp with joy and relief—then she squeezed the hand as hard as she could. When the man asked her name, she summoned all of her strength to say: “Priscilla!”
The man realized how hard it was for her to talk, so he did most of the talking—the sound of his voice flowing into her brain like a glorious symphony.
Priscilla indicated to the man she didn’t know what had happened. “The building blew up,” he said. “We don’t know why, but we’re checking it out.” By this time, others had crawled into the cramped, cave-like area to remove the rubble piece by piece. At every moment, someone held Priscilla’s hand.
Then, as her hope rose, the man holding her hand spoke gently: “Priscilla, we’re going to have to leave now. We’ll be back,
but we have to go get a tool.” What he did not say was that rescuers were being evacuated because of a bomb threat.
She gripped the man’s hand with all her might and found new breath as she begged him not to leave, wondering why they all had to go. She wouldn’t release the man’s hand. She felt him gently pry her fingers loose. “I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice cracking. “We don’t have any choice. We’ll be back. I promise.” Then they were gone, and Priscilla was alone in the terrible silence.
Her first reaction was a mixture of terror and anger. Because of the rubble that had been removed, her body was not as tightly constricted—though her head was still in a viselike grip.
As she writhed, she realized there was something poking her in the stomach. She worked her hand around so that she could feel the protrusion. It was a hand—a man’s hand, judging by its size. Her heart leapt, thinking it was her colleague Paul Ice and that perhaps he was in the same situation. She squeezed the hand, but it was cold and unresponsive. For the first time, she began to weep.
Then, out of nowhere, a loud voice boomed: “Hey, over here!” The scene was just like the first time—though the voices were different. A man took her hand and she squeezed back.
“Get me out of here,” she pleaded. Then she closed her eyes and waited and prayed. The men explained each step they took—the most dangerous one being to remove a massive metal and concrete column virtually resting on her head. It was a miracle that it had not slipped a single inch more. Above her were the awful sounds of circular saws and pneumatic tools. The rescuers worked fast, knowing that any instant the groaning building might shift at this location.
Priscilla’s legs and body were freed first and then both arms. The rescuers told her the hardest part would be last—getting her tightly pinned head free by trying to lift the monstrous column crushing her and, at the same moment, whisking her out from under it.
What if something slips? Priscilla thought. For the first time she realized with horror what could happen.
But before another thought could pass through her mind, the column rose a fraction of an inch. At that instant, a man dragged her free and flipped her onto her back. Terrible pain exploded in her—she had broken ribs, a collapsed lung and countless nasty puncture wounds all over her body. Four hours and 15 minutes had passed since the bomb exploded.
* * *
Capt. Randy Norfleet, a 29-year-old Marine pilot who had flown 35 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm and was now in charge of recruiting Marine officers in Oklahoma and Kansas, had made a rare visit to the main office that morning. He needed to speak to some of his colleagues and to make a few business calls, so he had driven to the Murrah Building, parked in front of a big yellow Ryder truck and went up to the sixth floor.
As the fire in the fuse inched closer to the detonator, Norfleet walked toward a desk with a telephone to make his call, but Capt. Randolph Guzman was already on the phone. At the instant of the explosion, Norfleet was hurled against a wall with the force of a hurricane. With quickly fading eyesight he saw that he had landed about five feet from where the front of the building was sheared off. Then everything started to go black.
When Randy put his hand to his head, he could feel what he knew was a severed artery pulsing from his mangled right eye. The blood pouring from his face distracted him from noticing that flying glass had also severed arteries in his arm and wrist. He was quickly weakening.
But as Randy’s strength ebbed, a powerful instinct came over him. He knew that he could not wait for rescuers but needed to risk everything to get out of the building and get medical help. To wait, he sensed, would be fatal.
Someone clamped a T-shirt to his eye socket to staunch the flow. With others helping him, he dragged himself toward a rear stairwell, fighting through rubble clouded with thick dust, and staggered down six floors, where he collapsed into the hands of paramedics. When he reached the hospital, he learned he had lost 50 percent of his blood volume. After more than five hours of surgery and 280 stitches, Randy Norfleet survived—though he will never again be able to serve as a pilot.
He knew that he could not wait for rescuers but needed to risk everything to get out of the building and get medical help.
Five days later, six floors down, rescuers found the body of Capt. Randolph Guzman. As rescuers gently removed the rubble from around him, they realized the officer was still seated in his chair at his desk—the very chair and desk Captain Norfleet had been waiting to use.
* * *
Hope for the others rose from the ghastly ruins of the Murrah Building that first day when hundreds of people were listed simply as missing. In the absence of solid information, people grasped at whatever they could find for sustenance.
One of those missing was Michael Loudenslager, 48, who was in his office at the General Services Administration on the first floor when the bomb exploded. For two days, his wife, Bettie, and their two children heard nothing. But their hopes brightened when one of Michael’s friends, recuperating from terrible injuries, told a remarkable story.
Randy Ledger, 38, was also on the first floor at the time of the explosion. He was buried under the rubble, and blood poured from his slashed throat. As he lay there, bleeding to death, he heard the distinctively gruff, husky voice of his friend: “Don’t worry, guy,” Michael Loudenslager boomed. “I see you and I’m going to get help.” When rescue workers found Randy, they clawed the rubble from his body. Paramedics rushed to stop the gushing blood and carried him away.
Only minutes from death, Randy reached the hospital and began a slow recovery from a severed artery and vein in his neck. Although he could not speak at first and communicated only by notes, he was able to let people know that it was Mike Loudenslager who had found him. He was certainly alive.
Days later, though, Loudenslager’s body was recovered—crushed beneath a huge concrete block deep inside the building, far from the spot where he had last seen his friend. Apparently he had gone farther in to help get someone else. “That’s the kind of guy he was,” Randy Ledger says.
* * *
In the hospital, Priscilla Salyers’s joy over being alive was muted as she wondered about the fates of co-workers—especially her friend Paul Ice. Several members of Ice’s family brought good news to Priscilla’s bedside. Paul’s name was on the big board in the hospital lobby of patients who had been treated for minor injuries and released.
“Paul Ice is such an unusual name,” they assured each other. “It has to be our Paul.”
But Paul did not show up. Days later, Special Agent Paul Ice’s crushed body was pulled from the building. Incredibly there was another Paul Ice injured in the explosion that day. It was he who had been treated and released.
Search-and-rescue crews attend a memorial service in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Priscilla Salyers has now recovered. She says she sees her life as a clean slate, and small problems never bother her anymore. Why is she alive while Paul Ice, inches away at the moment of the explosion, is dead?
“There are no answers,” Priscilla says. “And God doesn’t owe us any. It is up to us to have faith that somehow everything is in his plan.”
* * *
Even those not physically touched by the disaster will feel its effects for the rest of their lives. When Det. Don Hull went home to rest after spending seven hours at the Murrah Building, he felt he had to keep active. He dreaded what he would see if he let sleep take control of his mind. Images more awful than any nightmare he could imagine kept coming to mind. “As long as I kept my eyes open, I could control what I was seeing,” he says.
Most of the people he had seen in the building had been dead or dying. But one of his most haunting images was of the child he had shielded from the distraught couple.
With their daughters, seven and three, in bed, Jill and Don collapsed in front of the television set to catch up on the larger story of the bombing. One late-night news report said most of the ch
ildren in the child-care center were presumed to be dead; then it showed a very brief interview with one parent whose child had emerged alive from the blast.
Don Hull grabbed his wife’s hand. “I know that guy. I pulled his baby out!” Hull had been told the baby had died, but the man on TV seemed to be hopeful about his child’s chances, and then the interview was over.
At once, Don called the hospital, and an operator put him through to the waiting room where Dan and Dawn Webber were keeping vigil over their son Joseph. Don Hull wanted to know how the child was.
Dan Webber confirmed they were the parents he shielded from seeing the baby. Webber explained that the boy was in grave condition but that doctors thought he had a chance. “There’s no way our son would be alive if you hadn’t gotten him out,” Webber told Hull.
* * *
Thirteen hours after the explosion, the last survivor was pulled from the building. Search-and-rescue operations continued for 16 days, before the building was turned over to investigators. On May 23 less than 200 pounds of dynamite were used to crumble the remains of the Murrah Building into a heap of rubble.
Originally published in the May 1996 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.
In all, 168 people died in the Oklahoma City bombing, which to this day is the biggest act of terrorism ever carried out on American soil by an American citizen. Exactly five years after the explosion, President Clinton dedicated the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum on the site of the Murrah Building. Its centerpiece is the Survivor Tree, an American elm that stood 150 feet from the explosion yet survived—and continues to grow to this day. A Survivor Tree offspring is also growing on the lawn of the White House.
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