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On this date in 1995 at 9:02 a.m. CST, a Ryder truck, which contained about 5,000 pounds (2,300 kg) of fertilizer and fuel oil mixture packed into the back,detonated in front of the north side of the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The blast destroyed a third of the building and created a thirty-foot-wide, eight-foot-deep crater on NW 5th Street next to the building. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings in a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars around the site, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings (the broken glass alone accounted for 5% of the death total and 69% of the injuries outside the Murrah Federal building). The destruction of the building left several hundred people homeless and shut down multiple offices in downtown Oklahoma City.
The Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum includes a reflecting pool flanked by two large "gates", one inscribed with the time 9:01, the opposite with 9:03, the pool between representing the moment of the blast. On the south end of the memorial is a field full of symbolic bronze and stone chairs—one for each person lost, arranged based on what floor they were on. The chairs represent the empty chairs at the dinner tables of the victim's family. The seats of the children killed are smaller than those of the adults lost. On the opposite side is the "survivor tree", part of the building's original landscaping that somehow survived the blast and fires that followed it. The memorial left part of the foundation of the building intact, so that visitors can see the scale of the destruction.
As traditionally done on the 19th, there is 168 seconds of silence at 9:02 AM CST. One second for each person killed in the blast.
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