Inside The Pit, Searchers Labor to Find Victims

OKLAHOMA CITY — Once it was a day-care center, filled with pint-sized tables and chairs, festooned with crayon drawings of flowers and A is for Apple alphabet posters.

Now, rescue workers call that space The Pit.

It is a tomb.

Crawling on hands and knees under four-by-four braces that groan under the shifting weight of the shattered concrete, searchers edged closer Monday to the bodies of about 150 more bombing victims, including 15 missing children.

Three children were buried Monday, along with a 40-year-old Army sergeant, inaugurating the next sad cycle for this city even as the recovery of other bodies proceeds at an agonizing pace.

One of the first to be laid to rest was Aren Almon’s tiny baby, called “Miss Baylee” by her family and known to the nation as the toddler seen craddled gently in the arms of Fire Capt. Chris Fields on the day of the blast.

Three hundred mourners congregated at Baylee’s grave. Almon hugged the rescuers and cried. One mourner approached Fields and said “we appreciate all you did. God bless you.” Several others followed, hugging him.

“I wish there was more we could have done,” said Fields, tears in his eyes.

Three-year-old Kayla Titsworth and 4-year-old Ashley Eckles were also buried Monday. Funeral services were also held for Lola Bolden, an Army sergeant who had been riding in the federal building’s elevator when the blast occurred.

As the number of bodies recovered from the ruins rose to 83, structural engineers carefully plotted how to brace and buttress the ravaged nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building from further collapse.

The first videotape from inside the wreckage shows just how dangerous and nightmarish the rescue and recovery effort has become. With the stench from the decomposing bodies rising hourly, searchers at times have to remove their hardhats to squeeze through dark, narrow passageways that have been carved out of the rubble.

In heavy overalls, wearing kneepads, protective masks and rubber boots, searchers at times shinny into spaces so small that even some of the search dogs grow fearful.

In other places, able to stand or work upright on their knees, teams of four persons each formed single-file lines to pass chucks of concrete or other debris by hand or in five-gallon pails.

The work is tedious, painstaking and perilous. Two rescuers suffered minor injuries while inside Monday.

Leading a tour of the cavern-like ruins for a pool reporter and photographer, Oklahoma City firefighter Mike Shannon pointed out the The Pit, once the day-care center, and another section searchers have dubbed The Cave, which has yielded 18 bodies, some in pieces.

“There were multiple victims, compressed on each other,” said Shannon, serving as rescue coordinator. At times, Shannon said, searchers ended up “sorting body parts. You may find a right hand, then if every body I pull out has a right hand, I know I’m still looking for (another body).”

In another gruesome discovery, rescuers came upon the body of a U.S. Marine sitting in his chair at his desk, propped up by debris. To extricate the body, searchers had to cut away the chair. The Marines’ offices were on the sixth floor.

“It’s a very delicate operation,” said Buddy Young, regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “We want people to see what these guys are up against.”

Everywhere were found poignant reminders of the children: crushed toys, coloring books, mats on which the youngsters napped, a record with the songs “Ring Around the Alphabet” and “The Letters in My Name.” The record was broken.

Jon Hansen, assistant Oklahoma City fire chief, said the child-care center is under a “mountain of debris.” He predicted that 100 tons of debris eventually would be removed.

Officials stopped predicting when they expect to reach the floor of The Pit, where nine floors of rubble crashed on top of another.

“Each time we lift a piece off, there’s another piece shifting . . . It’s really slowing us down,” said Hansen, who described the building engineers standing by as the “guardian angels” for the search and rescue teams.

Throughout their two-hour shifts inside, searchers are constantly showered with concrete dust, crumbling rock and falling insulation,. And they are haunted by the creaking and groaning of the unstable building itself. Time-lapse cameras show cracks in the building are widening.

In front of the building, where the bomber’s truck was parked, a 20-foot crater called Ground Zero has been covered by boards.

For days searchers have reported seeing many bodies which they could not get to because they were pinned under debris. “Body recovery teams’ are standing by in white protective suits.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was to send in teams to oversee decontamination procedures.

FEMA search and rescue teams from Phoenix and Sacramento were sent home after working a grueling schedule since the explosion. They were replaced by teams from Miami, Fairfax County, Va., Puget Sound, Wash., and Menlo Park, Calif.

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The Grim Hunt

Rescue workers continue their painstaking, chunk-by-chunk search through treacherous debris. No survivor has been found in the rubble since the first night of the effort, and Assistant Fire Chief Jon Hansen said that finding one now would be miraculous.

Many of the missing are believed to be in these areas.

Area destroyed by blast

Day-care center where about 40 children were at the time of the blast.

Social Security offices where 65 people worked. It is unclear how many were there when the blast occurred.

Blast crater: 30 feet wide, 20 feet deep

Sources: Daily Oklahoman, staff reports