NORMAN, Okla. -- Seventeen years ago today, a 5,000-pound bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, claiming 168 souls. For many, life has never been quite the same.
Norman firefighter and resident Dana Cramer was teaching a class in Midwest City when the bomb -- planted in the Ryder truck Timothy McVeigh had parked outside the Murrah building -- went off.
"When it blew up I was at the Midwest City Fire Station No. 1 teaching a confined space rescue class," Cramer said. "We all heard it. We didn't know it was a terrorist act -- a natural gas explosion was the first thought."
Cramer said it was difficult to focus and finish out the class that didn't end until 5 p.m. that day. Later that evening, the firefighters responded to help in the search and rescue. The rest of the three-day class was postponed.
"It changed everything," Cramer said.
Norman resident Kenneth Butler worked at the main post office in downtown Oklahoma City in 1995. On April 19, he was in transit at two minutes after 9 o'clock.
"I was on the way back from Tinker (Air Force Base) and I saw the smoke," Butler said. "I guess at first they thought it was a gas explosion. By the time I got downtown to the post office, they knew it was a bomb."
Wife, Phyllis Butler was at work at United Design in Noble when she heard about the bombing. "I kept trying to reach him and I couldn't get him so I was really concerned," she said.
Kenneth Butler was a Postal Maintenance Supervisor and traveled to various post offices in his job.
"I didn't know where he was going to be that day," Phyllis Butler said.
The post office where Kenneth Butler worked was a mile away from the blast site but the explosion was so powerful it cracked three plate glass windows.
"Later in the afternoon, myself and about a half dozen more were escorted over there by the postal inspectors to the post office at Center City which had a lot of structural damage," Kenneth Butler said. None of the employees at Center City post office was hurt severely.
"Some were hurt by flying glass, but a body had been blown inside the building," Kenneth Butler said. "They recovered a body that had been blown into the building from the street."
That post office suffered a lot of damage.
"We worked three or four hours over there cleaning up what we could," he said. "It was real tense because once they heard it was a bomb, they weren't sure what the situation was, and they were afraid they might attack more federal buildings. I think the following day the main post office was closed for business."
Norman resident Dwayne Basey also worked for the main post office in downtown Oklahoma City but he was off work that morning. Basey was visiting a friend on the west side of Norman when the bomb went off at the Murrah building.
"I heard the blast," Basey said. "We were doing something out in the yard."
Even the initial rescue efforts found very few survivors.
"The Center City Station became a clean up area. It was right there by the building," Basey said. "We volunteered our time, and we handed out supplies to the firemen and the rescue workers.
"We provided them with gloves and kneepads and all the kinds of things they needed to work in the rubble."
That effort started a couple of days after the blast.
"By the time we got involved, it was no longer a rescue effort, it was recovery," Basey said. "They still had the dogs."
The recovery work was grueling for emergency responders.
"They had concrete floors with reinforced rebar falling one floor on another that they had to get down and crawl through -- it was pretty tough work," Basey said.
The rubble was especially hard on the search and recovery dogs.
"A lot of them wore rubber boots so they wouldn't cut their feet," Basey said.
Searchers were covered with concrete dust which many of them inhaled.
"They would hose it down to try and get the dust down," Basey said. "There were other people volunteering, but it was in a post office station that they worked on. It was right at Ground Zero. Postal workers just volunteered their time on their own."
For many, especially federal employees like Butler and Basey, increased security after the bombing was immediate. Those changes were the beginning of changes that would continue to multiply after the Sept. 11, 2001, bombing in New York City six years later.
"We had to change all of our thinking," Cramer said.
Firefighters started training to deal with chemicals and biohazards and the training for bombs came more to the forefront after the Murrah bombing.
"They wouldn't let us across the street toward the Murrah building," Butler said. "They put a portable chain link fence up there to keep people from wandering in. It was a terrible mess -- the building was just gutted out and sitting up there on nothing and looking like it could fall at any minute.
"It made you feel like this could happen to any one of us at any one of our buildings, particularly a mail service building where anything could come inside of packages. The security was really stepped up," he said.
People became more concerned about things like unoccupied trucks parked on the street.
"I had a good friend I'd known in the Air Force, and he worked for the water company and he got killed," Butler said. "There's was hardly anybody that wasn't touched by it a little bit. It was a terrible thing."
Copyright 2012 - Claremore Daily Progress, Okla.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
