{"id":18202,"date":"2015-04-19T00:02:26","date_gmt":"2015-04-19T05:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/?p=18202"},"modified":"2023-04-19T07:26:56","modified_gmt":"2023-04-19T13:26:56","slug":"the-day-of-the-murrah-bombing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/2015\/04\/19\/the-day-of-the-murrah-bombing\/","title":{"rendered":"The Day of the Murrah Bombing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"File<\/a>
File cabinets, carpeting, office furniture and building material are all visible in the demolished northern facade of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City April 19, 1995.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Like our shared 9\/11 experience<\/a>, the day of the truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City started, for me, on television.<\/p>\n

\"Fire<\/a>
Fire and rescue crews search the destroyed Murrah Federal Building in this view from the west April 19, 1995.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Since it happened in the morning, my newspaper coworkers and I were putting together the daily on deadline. I came out of the darkroom with a print for an editor and saw everyone crowded into the conference room, where the television lived since that’s where the cable enters the building.<\/p>\n

I stuck my head in the door, just like I would do six and a half years later on 9\/11\/01, to see everyone’s eyes glued to the images brought to us by Oklahoma City television stations.<\/p>\n

The destruction and chaos looked to me, initially, like an underground gas explosion we’d seen on television some years earlier in Mexico, and my first take was that Oklahoma City must have experienced a similar disaster.<\/p>\n

Immediately we decided to hold the front page, and waited for stories and images to arrive from the Associated Press. At the same time, our editor decided we should have some stories and images of our own, so my news editor and I hit the road.<\/p>\n

We arrived in downtown Oklahoma City at around 11:30 am, by which time the entire scene was locked down pretty hard. Still, we were able to get ahold of a local state representative, who we interviewed, and I was able to see most of the demolished building with my 300mm lens.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A police officer takes a picture from atop an emergency command vehicle with the bombed Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in the background.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One thing I’ve learned as a journalist over the years is that in situations like 9\/11 or the Murrah bombing or Ada’s Evergreen Mill fire in March 2000<\/a> is to do my job as quietly and transparently as possible. People in those situations and witnessing those situations are emotionally raw and frequently irrational, and no opinion of mine will improve that. So I remain as quiet as I can, and I make pictures as inconspicuously as possible.<\/p>\n

I visited the site of the bombing a couple of years after the event, and again in about 2000. I also took my wife Abby to visit the site<\/a>, now known as the Oklahoma City National Memorial<\/a>, in 2008, and she found the experience quite moving.<\/p>\n

\"I<\/a>
I made this image of the Oklahoma City National Memorial in about 2000. As you can see, it is an elegant, fitting tribute to the event.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like our shared 9\/11 experience, the day of the truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City started, for me, on television. Since it happened in the morning, my newspaper coworkers and I were putting together the daily on deadline. I came out of the darkroom with a print for an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-journals-notebooks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18202"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30459,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18202\/revisions\/30459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}