Oklahoma City Bombing, 1995

The Oklahoma City Bombing

It was 9 :00 in the morning on a bright Wednesday morning . People were beginning the day just like they did every day . Parents had dropped their children off at the daycare located on the second floor of the Federal Building and the workers in the building were settling in for a day of work . At 9 :02 central time all semblance of normalcy was destroyed forever and Oklahoma City , previously thought of by the locals as the city where nothing much ever happened (Pressley , A1 , became the

site of the worst terrorist attack committed on United States ground in history (Indianapolis Star , 1 . It held that title until 2001 when another bright sunny morning was shattered by tragedy

A Ryder moving van had been strategically parked on the street along in front of the Alfred

. Murrah Federal Building . This truck was filled with an explosive combination of chemicals . The chemicals consisted of a fertilizer called ammonium nitrate and a racing fuel called nitromethane (Indianapolis Star , 1 . No one paid any special attention to the truck , because vehicles were parked in front of the building every day , and until that day such an event had never occurred in the United States . Everyone in the city went about business as usual unaware of the plot that had been planned for months and was set into place that morning

The Oklahoma City Federal Building was a nine story building with many government offices located in it . In addition to the offices , a daycare with an enrollment of approximately forty children was located on the second floor of the building . Many of these children were the children of Federal employees who worked in the building . The workers had previously been reassured by the knowledge that their children were in the same building they were in during the day . Unfortunately where the daycare was located in the building , put it in one of the most damaged areas of the building

When the explosive filled truck exploded , the entire north side of the building collapsed . Witnesses and rescue workers stated that the floors of the building fell on top of each other in a pancake like pattern (Pressley , A1 . The blast was so violent that vibrations from it were felt up to thirty miles away (Pressley , A1 . Cars parked in the street burned for more than an hour after the blast and caused smelly black smoke to pollute the air . The explosion broke windows and knocked people to the floor several blocks from the federal building , created a two story pile of debris as in front of the building and across to a parking lot , and an eight foot deep by twenty foot in diameter crater was created at the bomb location (Pressley , A1

Within minutes of the explosion stunned injured people began to emerge from the severely damaged building and equally stunned rescue workers were called to the scene to provide on site treatment and assistance to the disaster...