Nine Oh Two AM

The elm tree in the plaza of the Oklahoma City National Memorial was here before the Murrah Building. It was here before the parking lot, before the street, before most of the city around it. On the morning of April nineteenth, nineteen ninety-five, the blast shattered its bark and stripped it of leaves. By the next spring, it had put out new growth. They call it the Survivor Tree now. It is an American elm, and it is the oldest living thing in the memorial.

At nine oh two in the morning, Timothy McVeigh detonated a Ryder rental truck loaded with four thousand eight hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer mixed with nitromethane fuel. The truck was parked in the drop-off lane outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The explosion destroyed the north face of the building and damaged or destroyed three hundred forty other structures in a sixteen-block radius.

One hundred sixty-eight people died. Nineteen of them were children at the America's Kids day-care center on the building's second floor.

McVeigh had planned the attack for months. He chose April nineteenth deliberately, the second anniversary of the federal siege at Waco, Texas, and the two hundred twentieth anniversary of the opening shots of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord. He had been radicalized by the militia movement's anger at the federal government's actions at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco. He saw himself as a patriot. His co-conspirators were Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier. McVeigh was convicted and executed by lethal injection on June eleventh, two thousand one.

The memorial that now occupies the site was dedicated on April nineteenth, two thousand. The design centers the moment of the blast. One hundred sixty-eight bronze-and-stone chairs are arranged in the footprint of the destroyed building, one for each person killed. Nineteen smaller chairs mark the children. The Gates of Time, two large bronze panels standing at the edge of the reflecting pool, are marked nine oh one and nine oh three, bracketing the single minute that changed the city.

The Survivor Tree drops seeds every year. The memorial program grows seedlings from those seeds and gives them away.