Ten years ago today, sometime around 6:30 am, I broke snuck into an unoccupied floor of the City Place Building in downtown Oklahoma City. It was the building I worked in at my first job in Oklahoma City so I was familiar with the view it offered and I knew I would have a fairly descent view of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building implosion scheduled for 7:00 am that morning. I set up my Canon EOS 650 with a telephoto lens on a tripod, took some wide angle photos, zoomed in, took one more photo, set the camera to continuous exposure (approximately 3 frames a second), got reasonably comfortable, put my finger on the shutter button, looked toward what remained of the Murrah Building and waited.

Less than 150 pounds of explosives had been carefully placed at 420 locations by CDI (Controlled Demolition, Inc.). At 7:01 am, the button was pushed to implode the building. A split second later, I pushed and held the shutter button on my camera. Seven seconds later it was done. The second photo below is the first one I took of the implosion. The next three photos are 3, 8 and 12 frames later. I waited some time for the smoke to clear before taking the last photo.

Shortly after the implosion, the bodies of the remaining three victims of the April 19th bombing were removed from the rubble. My story about the day of the bombing.