Word: oklahomas
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MARVETTE CRITNEY WAS A little uneasy when she went to work Thursday at a federal office building in Washington. Still dwelling on the images from Oklahoma City, the 26-year-old management analyst for the Internal Revenue Service had decided not to put her four-month-old son in the new irs day-care center. Even for herself, working in a federal office building suddenly seemed like a risky proposition. But as the morning went on, she managed to put those thoughts out of her mind. Then the alarm went...
...windowless basement office, she heard the abrupt clanging of the building's fire alarm and a message on the public-address system to evacuate. This was not a drill. "People were running everywhere," says Critney. "I wondered if this was connected to the Oklahoma bombing. All I could think of was my two sons. What would they do without their mother?" After she and her co-workers rushed out of the building, they learned that the emergency was not a fire but a bomb threat. That was when it occurred to Critney that she might not be any safer outside...
...aftermath of Oklahoma City, many Americans found it hard to avoid looking at their surroundings in an unsettling new light, in which any abandoned package might be a grenade, any car a bomb. The possibility of domestic terrorism, first raised by the World Trade Center bombing and then dismissed as a big-city phenomenon, may finally be driven home. For some time to come Americans will be struggling with questions that were supposed to draw no closer than Jerusalem or Belfast or, at worst, Manhattan. Just how much can they do to make life safer from terrorist attacks...
Ammonium nitrate is a double-edged chemical. Spread it on a field and it becomes a benign fertilizer that helps produce bumper crops. Mix it with fuel oil and it becomes the kind of deadly bomb that shook Oklahoma City last week. The U.S. makes 8 million tons of the white crystalline compound each year, and it is widely available in gardening centers, supply warehouses and at construction sites. But just because anyone can buy ammonium nitrate for about 11¢ a pound doesn't mean that anyone can make it explode at a particular time and place...
While it is doubtful that the ANFO used in the Oklahoma blast was purchased or stolen, someone with the right kind of knowledge could have concocted it by using ammonium- nitrate fertilizer and diesel fuel. The fertilizer is not as pure a preparation as what is used for demolition work and has to be treated before it can be converted into an explosive substance. But such information is available in books published by fringe presses and on the Internet...