schadenfreude Wrote:
If you're ever driving through OKC, it's worthwhile to stop by the memorial.
I did that two years ago while driving cross country.
You always hear about the memorial, but I never knew there was a full museum as well. And it is
devastating.
First, you get some general info about the history of the Murrah building and a section on how little we, the public, really knew about terrorism on U.S. soil in those days--for instance, there had been nearly 200 terrorist incidents in the U.S. in the preceding ten years, things like abortion clinic bombings and hate group activities. The museum is then laid out chronologically, starting with what was going on around Oklahoma City and in the Murrah Building that morning. The last thing you see in this section is a wall-size freeze frame from a hotel security camera down the street of a Ryder truck passing by.
You are then sent into a small conference room, a mock-up of one a block or so away where, on that morning, a 9:00 a.m. conference was just starting. Someone taped it, and you listen to the first several minutes of the actual meeting until you hear the explosion. At which point the lights go out, and one wall lights up with pictures of all the dead.
The doors on the other end of the conference room automatically open, and you are sent out into a cacaphony of voices, sirens, helicopters and news reports coming out of speakers all around you. Monitors hung throughout this wing show you the earliest local news reports of the blast, then that horrible traffic helicopter shot as it rounds the building for the first time.
Further on you get interviews with survivors describing the scene--one woman tells of a meeting in her office when, in a flash, her desk, the wall, the floor, and all of the other people in the room were just...gone. All around you are display cases filled with shattered office equipment, or dozens of shoes, or toys, or broken eyeglasses--some identified with the owner's name if it's known. Overhead runs some 20 feet or so of steel girder, cruelly bent out of shape. Crumpled metal filing cabinets here; there, a massive stained glass window frame from the church around the corner, the glass gone, the wood splintered.
The museum is in the building across the street from the Murrah Building, set back from the road by a parking lot that is the only reason this building wasn't gutted, too. On the outside, they've shored up the damage but left the scars visible. Inside, now incorporated into the museum, they've kept one room that directly faced the blast exactly as it lay, a men's restroom turned into a demolition site of bricks, twisted metal and shattered porcelain.
It's been two years since I visited and I'm still chocking up a bit while writing this. What a piece of work is man.
