The Rear View Mirror

A couple days ago we had a chance to go down town Oklahoma City, and see the memorial at the bombing site. There’s a museum in the Journal Record Building, but you are not allowed to take pictures there, so the only pictures in the gallery are from the outside portion of the memorial.

The exhibit inside is one of the best museum exhibits I’ve been to. It’s self-guided, and the first portion explains which Federal Agencies had offices there, and what a typical day would be like in the office building.

We then walked into a room designed to be like an interview office. A tape then began to play, and you could hear that it was an ordinary statement being taken for some court proceedings. You heard the lawyer give the time and date at the beginning of the tape. “Today is April 19th, and it is 9:00.” Two minutes later you could hear the explosion rip through the building and the people screaming on the tape. The room lit up, and across the glass window of the interview office were the faces of the people who died that day. The exit doors opened and you walked into a room that showed the news coverage as it unfolded. Also on the speakers were all the emergency dispatch recordings playing all at once. It created a very cacophonous environment. Displayed in the room were various artifacts recovered after the explosion. There was a case full of recovered keychains. Some keys were broken in half; some were twisted and bent. They showed dayplanners that had been crumpled by the explosion. Seeing the ordinary objects so mutilated gave you not only a sense for the destructvie force of the blast, but also made you realize these were just ordinary people suspecting nothing unusual that day.

The rest of the exhibit showed how the rescue effort unfolded as well as the tracking down of Timothy McVeigh. One portion of the Journal Record, where the exhibit was, had been preserved to look exactly how it did after the blast. The floor was covered with cinder blocks, and twisted pipes. Shelves of books had been knocked to the ground.

The outside memorial has a reflecting pool, which is positioned over the area where 5th street ran. That is where the Ryder truck full of ammonium nitrate was parked. On both ends of the Reflecting Pool are two Gates of Time. On one end is the 9:01 gate, which represents innocence. On the other end is 9:03, which represents healing. The Reflecting Pool in the middle represents 9:02, the time when the bomb exploded. Where the Murrah Federal Building once stood are 168 chairs representing every person that lost their life in the bombing.

Click here to see the gallery, and click here to see the 360° panorama.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 14th, 2005 at 3:48 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.