Ten years ago today at 9:02 am I was sitting in my office in Oklahoma City when I heard an explosion that literally shook my desk. I was on the twelfth floor of a twelve story building and my first thought was that a boiler had exploded on the roof or possibly a tanker truck had exploded at street level immediately in front of my building. I would have doubted the explosion could have come from a block away and thought it impossible that it had happened four blocks away.

I got up from my desk and walked out of my office where I met a coworker who had just left his office. I had been with the firm for just five weeks and asked my coworker jokingly, “Does this happen often here?” He smiled and responded that it did not.

A secretary whose station faced north alerted everyone to the cloud of smoke which appeared to be rising from the Federal Court House three blocks north of our building.

In the aerial photo, my building, the Robinson Renaissance is at the bottom with my office in yellow, the Federal Bankruptcy Court House is three blocks north with the red roof, the Federal Court House is attached to the north side of it and the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building is represented by the top red rectangle.

At this point it was apparent that this was a significant event and it appeared that the Federal Court House which I had just been in the previous week was the site of the explosion. My father, in Illinois, was always on top of the news often alerting me to Oklahoma weather conditions prior to my learning of them. I realized that sometime during the day he would hear about an explosion at a court house in Oklahoma City. I decided to call him to let him know that I was OK so that he and, more likely my mother, would not worry. I called home, my father answered and I relayed to him what little we knew or thought we knew at the time and assured him that I was alright. He was very thankful that I had called and said that he’d relay the information to my mom and sister.

I then called my wife, fiancée at the time, in Tulsa to tell her the same information. Unlike my dad, her attitude was much more casual and she initially refused to relay the information to her parents. Within five minutes after the explosion I had notified those that mattered of the events and that I was not involved which was a good thing since ten minutes later the phone lines in and out of Oklahoma City were so jammed that no calls got through for the next day or so.

Everyone in the office was glued to the windows watching the smoke rise and emergency vehicles converge. Several radios were on but they offered little more information than what we could already observe. The father of a young associate in the office was a federal judge and at this point in time we still thought that the explosion had taken place in the Federal Court House. The associate was indecisive about what she should do as she was obviously very concerned about her father. She expressed a desire to go to the court house but was hesitant. I offered to go with her and she accepted. She and I made our way towards the Federal Court House but were intercepted by police who were already in the process of cordoning off the area. After wandering around the perimeter for a while we eventually ran into her father in the lobby of a building. He was in the process of looking for his two daughters who worked downtown. Remember, by then, there was no phone service.

I eventually went back to the office where after a while we were all told to go home. Even four blocks away there were many building with windows broken. The severity of the damage away from the federal building is one of the lesser known effects of the Oklahoma City bombing. People who toured the area shortly afterwards often commented how they didn’t realize the extent of the damage to other buildings. Several other buildings had collapsed or subsequently had to be torn down due to structural damage and over 300 buildings suffered some form of damage including ones as far as ten blocks away.

The diagram shows the Murrah Building in the center with damaged buildings in brown.