Oklahoma City: The Blood of Innocents

IN THE BOMB'S AFTERMATH, TALES OF HORROR AND HEROISM

By Nancy Gibbs Monday, May 01, 1995

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    The Phoenix Urban Heavy Rescue Team deployed its ropes and rigging equipment, special optical cameras with lights that can fit into small holes or spaces in debris, listening devices that can detect human heartbeats several feet away. Every so often the order went out for total silence: the chain saws stilled, all two way radios and cellular phones shut off, the helicopters and heavy equipment were sent away. "The idea is to get very quiet, don't even breathe, just drop the devices in and listen," says Gary Morris, deputy chief of the Phoenix fire department. "These devices are very sensitive."

    Suddenly a fireman heard a thin voice crying for help as though from deep in a cave. Dana Bradley, 20, lay in the darkness of the basement under a pile of cement girders, bleeding and her body dangerously cooling in a foot of water. But when a team of four fire fighters found her, they faced one harsh decision after another. That southwest corner of the building was highly unstable; there were girders smashed everywhere, with hundreds of tons of the remaining building above them. Bradley was lodged in a space so small that the doctors could scarcely reach her. "Two of us tried to get an IV into her, but we couldn't get it done," says Dr. Gary Massad, a volunteer doctor who arrived on the scene shortly after noon. "The space was just too small, and she had rebar over her so we couldn't get a needle into her. But we felt we couldn't wait." Rebars are the steel reinforcing bars that were at that point holding up what was left of the building. The only way to reach her was to remove them. At the same time, Bradley's blood pressure was dropping, and she was in the early stages of shock. Then the walls began to vibrate, sending the doctors and fire fighters racing out. "Please don't leave me!" Bradley pleaded. They returned 20 minutes later, only to have to leave again when word spread that another bomb had been found. "My greatest fear," says Massad, "was that I would be ordered to leave the building, that I would have to leave her trapped there. I would have carried that to my grave."

    Finally, the team decided to cut the rebar to reach Bradley. But the space was still tiny for the three doctors. "You had to crawl in on your hands and knees in about a foot of water," says Massad. The doctors told her the only chance to save her would be to cut off the leg crushed beneath the girders. She begged them to try another way. "She was in shock, but very alert. We said, regardless, we are going to do it." The risk, the team agreed, was that without immediate surgery, Bradley would quickly lapse into a coma and die.

    It was an operation no modern surgeon outside of a battlefield thought he would ever perform. Giving her much painkiller would also increase the risk of coma, so as Dana screamed, a surgeon used surgical saws, scissors and scalpels to remove the leg below the knee. When they were done, they hauled her out with a chest harness and carried her 100 yards on a gurney to a waiting ambulance. Only later did the doctors learn that she had lost her mother and two children in the blast.

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