Grace from the Rubble by Jeanne Bishop

Author:Jeanne Bishop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2020-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

THE AFTERMATH

The day after the bombing, Thursday, Bud and his wife, Lois, drove toward the site but couldn’t get near it. Police had blocked off the streets.

“The building was on 5th Street, and the closest you could get was 9th Street. You could park your car and walk to 7th Street. There were more barricades there; they wouldn’t let people get any closer,” Bud remembered. “I told the officer, ‘My daughter’s in the building,’ and he let me go a block closer, but still not close enough to see the building.”

Governor Keating and his wife, Cathy, had already been to the building together early that morning, around 6:00 a.m. “You didn’t hear anything. It was just deathly quiet,” Keating said.

“By then, big light trucks were shining lights on everything. A firefighter came up, not wearing an Oklahoma uniform, from somewhere else. I stepped out and said, ‘Thank you for being here.’ He said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘I’m the governor.’ He didn’t say nice to meet you, etc. He punched his finger in my chest and said, ‘Well, you find out who did this, because the only thing I pulled from the rubble was a child’s finger and the American flag.’”

One team leader supervising rescue workers doing twelve-hour shifts said he was having a hard time getting them to take a break.

Huge refrigerated trucks were parked nearby to receive the bodies, and body parts, of victims. Rescue dogs were so despondent over finding no survivors that first responders took turns hiding in the debris of the destroyed building, to give the dogs the reward of finding a living human and not a corpse.

People lined up to donate blood, from Hells Angels to businesspeople in suits, in lines so long it often took six or seven hours to give. Members of the Oklahoma Restaurant Association started a twenty-four-hour food service for rescue workers, serving up to twenty thousand meals per day for the next ten days.

Press from around the globe descended on Oklahoma City. Getting there was rough; storms had rolled in, with lightning strikes all around the airport. One journalist reported flying in on a plane whose approach at Will Rogers World Airport was so bumpy that passengers were throwing up. When reporters arrived at the scene of the bombing, they fared not much better; one remembered being overwhelmed by the stench of dead flesh rotting in the rain.

The catastrophe dominated national and world news for days on end. The coverage was stunned and sympathetic. One journalist, George Howe Colt for Life magazine, wrote, “To the millions of Americans who watched body after body being borne from the wreckage—some of them so small that weeping firefighters couldn’t bear to look down at what they so gently cradled—it seemed as if the heart of the nation itself had been sundered.”

Desperate for news of Julie, Bud went to First Christian Church to sign up for notifications. A family assistance center was created at the downtown church within hours after the bombing as a place where families could get news of their loved ones’ fates.

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