Word: blastingly
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...TWISTERS, those ugly storms that arrive across the prairie to savage the towns, tear them apart and leave, tossing houses behind them. To live there means understanding that nature is not evil, only whimsical. Human nature, on the other hand, proved incomprehensible at 9:02 Wednesday morning. The blast came at the very height of the morning rush. A red-orange fireball lit the sky, and the north side of the building dissolved. The carcass left standing looked monstrous, drooling cable and concrete onto the plaza below, huffing gas and smoke and dust into the sky above. Glass fell like...
Survival depended on where the people in the building were sitting when the blast went off, whether they had got up to go to a coffee machine or visit a friend down the hall. On the top floor, the explosion peeled the roof back and sliced the building in half, sparing many on one side and sending hundreds of others crashing down, floor after floor, into the rubble below. The chief of a housing program was spared because he had just left the building for an inspection trip and was taking his car out of a garage when the blast...
...with the fate of their friends. As co-workers struggled to rescue one another, a retired policeman pulled out his badge and began directing traffic away from the carnage. An employee of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was in an elevator at the time of the blast; he went into a six-story free fall. But having landed safely and climbed out of the rubble, he immediately went to work tracking down leads...
Trent Smith, 41, was lying on a bed across the street at the YMCA when the blast hoisted him seven feet in the air and tossed him toward the window. His 240-lb. frame shattered the glass. The next thing he knew, his body was hanging halfway out the square hole that was once a nice view of the federal building. Had he weighed less, he says, he would have been on the street. Groggy and bleeding, Smith backed away from the window, aching and exhausted. The more he limped, the more his leg hurt. He heard a man down...
...young mother jumped into her car, and headed to her secretarial job at the IRS five blocks away. Her colleagues had bought a cake and soda in celebration of Smith's 23rd birthday on Friday. As she stood up to slice the cake, she heard the blast and the building shook. From the windows they could see the smoke rising: "We thought it was the bank," recalls Smith. "I turned to a co-worker and said that's so sad. That's some little child's mother that's been killed...