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The Official Record of the Oklahoma City Bombing
Humble Heroes
The Men and Women of the Oklahoma City Fire Department
Story by Maura McDermott
"We are not heroes." The Oklahoma City firefighters tried to tell us this
during the sixteen days they rescued the survivors and recovered the
victims of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in
downtown Oklahoma City. Firefighters tried to point out who they
considered the real heroes of the tragedy. The innocent dead. The families
of the victims. The survivors. The unnamed, untrained folks who ran into
the building minutes after it fell to pull the shocked and bleeding out of
the dust. The Red Cross and other volunteers. The police, emergency
medical workers, doctors, nurses, soldiers.
As for why practically everyone but they were heroes, the explanation was simple:
"We were doing our job." They were right. If the bombing was the
biggest event in the history of the Oklahoma City Fire Department, it was
also simply a more intense version of what firefighters deal with every
day: scenes of destruction where some people are saved, others lost. It
was one of about forty thousand calls or rides Oklahoma City firefighters
take each year--to fires, to car wrecks, to heart attacks, to chlorine
spills, to hot air balloons fallen out of the sky. "Anytime the light
kicks on, we are expected to take care of it," says Corporal Rick
Harris of Fire Station 1, located just five blocks from the site of the
Murrah building. So, on the morning of April 19, 1995, Harris and others
on the red shift at Station 1 took a ride to the worst terrorist attack
ever on American soil.
Photo at left by David Fitzgerald
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