9:02 a.m. - 10:35 a.m. April 19, 1995: Oklahoma City Blast Survivors Begin Evacuating; First Responders Appear

A bloodied survivor is helped from the Murrah bomb site. [Source: The Oklahoman]Survivors of the Murrah Federal Building bomb blast in Oklahoma City (see 7:00 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995) begin evacuating. By 9:30, a triage center has been established at the corner of 6th and Robinson Streets. By 10 a.m., 59 survivors have either been rescued from the blasted building or have emerged on their own. The next day, the Washington Post will report: “Workers staggered out of stairwells, blood dripping into their eyes. A woman moaned on the ground, part of her leg apparently missing from the blast. Employees at buildings blocks away reported being thrown from their chairs, windows were shattered, and residents who live 30 miles from downtown reported feeling the powerful vibrations of the blast. Everywhere around the city, people stood in stunned silence, not believing what they had just seen and heard, not comprehending how anyone could have done such a thing.” Physician Carl Spengler, who arrives at the scene a few minutes after the blast to render assistance, tells a reporter: “It’s like Beirut. Everything burning and flattened.” Hours after the explosion, Assistant Fire Chief John Hansen says rescue workers see “many more fatalities in the building that we are working around” while searching for survivors. The task of searching for survivors goes on throughout the day and into the night, interrupted by erroneous reports of a second bomb being spotted and the subsequent evacuation of the scene (see 10:28 a.m. April 19, 1995). An agent of the medical examiner’s office, Richard Dugger, says: “Tomorrow will be the really awful day when everyone starts to get the official notification. That’s going to be a horrible thing to watch.” By 10:15, blood drives for the injured have begun at nearby Tinker Air Force Base and the Oklahoma Blood Institute. At 10:34, a new triage center is established at the corner of NW 3rd Street and Harvey Street. By 10:35, the Department of Defense delivers bomb-sniffing dogs, surgeons, equipment, medivac aircraft, and body bags to the site. [Washington Post, 4/20/1995; The Oklahoman, 4/2009] One mother, Helena Garrett, whose child Tevin is in the Murrah day care facility, runs from the nearby Journal Record building to the devastated Murrah Building to rescue her son, but is not allowed in by police officers. She finds another way in and begins climbing a pile of rubble to get to the day care on the second floor, but a man pulls her back down to the ground, telling her it is not safe for her to try to get to the facility. A few minutes later, people begin bringing dead, dying, and injured children out. Garrett, who knows the children in the facility, helps comfort one dying boy, two-year-old Colton Smith, until he loses consciousness for the last time. Garrett watches, numb and stricken, as the rescuers begin lining the children up on white sheets one by one on the ground. She screams: “Please don’t lay our babies on the glass! We don’t want our babies on the glass!” and a man with a broom sweeps away much of the broken glass on the ground where the rescuers are placing the bodies of the children, crying as he sweeps. Garrett never sees her son alive again; he is not found until April 22. The officials of the funeral home caring for Tevin’s body will convince Garrett not to look at her son’s head, as he is terribly disfigured by a crushing head injury. Instead, she recalls, they will open the lower lid of the casket. She later recalls, “I kissed his feet and his I kissed his legs, and I couldn’t go up higher.” [Serrano, 1998, pp. 166-168]