HEROES IN THE HEARTLAND

It has been 25 years since a truck bomb ripped through a federal office building in Oklahoma City. The tales of courage and survival amid the horror that day are as searing and inspiring as ever.

- Henry Hurt

At around six on the morning of April 19, 1995, the area around the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in the heart of Oklahoma City began to come alive as hundreds of people—workers, visitors, folks with government business—converged on the downtown area.

Among those heading toward the building that day was a man driving a large yellow truck, its sides emblazoned with the black-lettered logo Ryder.

Inside the 20-foot truck were 4,800 pounds of a ghoulish, volatile mixture of diesel fuel oil and gray ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which filled as many as two dozen 55-gallon blue plastic barrels. The entire truck was a lethal bomb.

Shortly before 9 a.m., the man pulled the yellow truck up to a parking spot on the street in front of the Murrah Building. The truck was just east of the center of the north-facing building. Thirty feet away, above the entrance, the children of the America’s Kids childcare center were playing. Some of them had parents who worked in the 18-year-old glass-and-granite-clad building, which housed 16 federal agencies.

Just a few minutes before 9 a.m., the man lit the fuse and walked away. In the daycare center, the smallest children had been placed in their cribs to settle down for naps. The older children sang their favorite songs, then had free time to play.

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 structure’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.