Q&A: Lessons in Emergency Management on the 30th Anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing
On the morning of 19 April 1995, people were going about their business at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
The major building hosted 11 U.S. federal agency offices, a credit union, and a child care center. It was a bustling center of activity in the U.S. state’s capital with approximately 600 federal and contract workers and about 250 visitors that morning.
But then, at 9:02 a.m. local time, everything changed. At that moment, a homemade truck bomb made with more than 2 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil exploded outside the Murrah building—causing one-third of the building to collapse, injuring hundreds of people, and ultimately killing 168 others.
The response to the incident—two years after the World Trade Center bombing in New York City—was massive and included first responders from all over the United States through a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) project.
FEMA launched the National Urban Search & Rescue Response System in 1989 to organize federal, state, and local partner emergency response teams as integrated federal disaster response task forces. These 28 task forces can be deployed by FEMA to a designated disaster area to be pre-positioned to assist when a major disaster threatens a community or to help in structural collapse rescue.
Type 1 task forces in this system are composed of 70 members that specialize in search, rescue, medicine, hazardous materials, logistics, and planning. These teams can be split into two Type 3 task forces of 35 members to conduct around-the-clock search and rescue operations in 12-hour shifts.
In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, FEMA deployed several of these teams to Oklahoma to assist with search and rescue efforts, and eventually recovery efforts. Ken Winkler, retired New York Police Department (NYPD) Emergency Service Unit (ESU) Detective, was on one of those teams.
He had joined the New York Police Department in 1981 and then moved to its Emergency Service Unit (ESU) in 1987. While he had worked on the World Trade Center bombing response, Oklahoma City was his first deployment with the FEMA system. He and his team flew out to Oklahoma and arrived on 20 April to help with search and rescue efforts.
On Friday evening, 18 April 2025, Winkler—who retired in 2002 from the NYPD—will speak on a panel at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum about the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing.
Before the panel, Winkler spoke with Security Management about his experience of assisting in the response in Oklahoma and emergency management lessons for today’s security practitioners. The conversation below has been lightly edited for clarity.
Security Management (SM). Do you remember where you were when you heard about the bombing? And when did you deploy to Oklahoma?
Ken Winkler. There are certain things that happen in life that you just—no matter what—remember. Obviously, there are things we forget as we get older, but there are certain things that we never forget. This is one of them.
In ’95 I was home, and we weren’t in the era of 24-hour news coverage. I didn’t have a cell phone…so I remember seeing something about it in the morning. It happened at 9:00, which was 10:00 New York Time. And I remember my wife asking me later in the day what I thought about it. I said, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t heard much about it. It’s probably a gas line explosion.’ All that evening, I took my daughter to swim lessons, picked up food, by the time we got home, the 6:00 news was over. I went to bed, and later that evening, I’m going to say 10:00, the phone rang, and it was somebody from ESU saying that the team was being mobilized and asked, ‘Can you go?’ I looked at my wife, and I said, ‘What do you think?’ and she said, ‘Yeah, go.’
We all had our own go bags back then—still do—you had to be self-sustained for 72 hours. I went down to Floyd Bennett Field, and there was a lot of activity—getting equipment, lowering equipment on pallets and onto trucks. Then we went out to JFK (Airport), and we were on a military plane, and we landed at Tinker Air Force Base sometime in the afternoon on the 20th.
We were tasked with finding a location we could set up, and there was a building not too far from where the Murrah building was that we were going to utilize. Later that afternoon, we were told that there was another location that had been set up for us at the convention center, and we started working that evening. We were doing 7:00 at night to 7:00 in the morning, and we were working closely with the team from Virginia Beach.
SM. What did that work with the Virginia Beach team entail? What was your role in the response?
Winkler. We were identified as rescue specialists. Within the FEMA teams you have rescue specialists, structural specialists, mass specialists—the whole group of people. Each team had a team of rescue specialists led by a supervisor.
There would be a briefing, and you would be told what you had to do that evening. It could be anything from doing a shared operation to working with local first responders—the Oklahoma City Fire Department—or you could be assigned to looking for evidence with the FBI or ATF.
We were still in the mindset of rescue. That building, when you have an implosion it created like a pancake. And if you looked at it, it would create a slide so there was always a possibility of finding somebody in the voids. Unfortunately, we didn’t find anybody alive.
And that was it. That’s how we ran for the next five or six days.
SM. What was it like to be there and to get into that mindset that, this really awful thing has happened, but we have to get to work now?
Winkler. That’s part of the job, right? Whether we’re doing it in New York City or doing it someplace else, we respond to major events throughout the city and now throughout the country. That’s what we’re train for.
We worked the ’93 bombing, which was pretty much self-contained within the World Trade Center. It’s something you don’t see a lot of photos or media coverage on. Even though I think six people lost their lives that day and many, many were injured, it was a different type of response. I got there in the afternoon because my wife wasn’t home…but there was a lot of ad hoc, people showing up—‘I’m from first responders’—and kind of going on their own. I know people that climbed the stairs more than once. It was not as organized as it probably should have been. We weren’t really following an incident command system. It took a while before that came into play.
And in Oklahoma City, with FEMA and the FEMA training, we had a strong incident command system. We had teams that were organized, that were similarly equipped. We had equipment, caches, and we were able to be more organized in our response.
One of the things that struck me the most about the attack in Oklahoma City was the tremendous effect on the residents. It’s a smaller community, and it seemed like everybody had a connection to the Murrah building—whether they worked there, whether they did business there.
That first day, we were on the ground, we set up that base of operations, and a car pulled up. A couple came out, and they had beverages—water, Gatorade. Then they had all this food that they made. Coming from New York, you’re always taught not to talk to strangers—much less take something from a stranger.
But then we started to realize that this was sincere. The impact to the citizens was tremendous, and we were there to help them kind of get to the bottom of it—to get their lives back together again.
When you’re in the building or when you’re working and you’re in an event, you kind of just focus on the event. You’re not focused on what’s going on outside here. It’s like that saying, ‘can’t see the trees for the forest.’ You’re focused on what’s in front of you. You’re trying to find somebody, trying to recover somebody’s loved ones, and being safe in a dangerous situation. Safety is very important. We didn’t want to lose anybody else. So that’s kind of where your mindset is.
SM. How many days were you there?
Winkler. I think we did six working days. There were two teams there already, I think from Phoenix and a team from California. They had the day shift, and we had a night shift. So, we just kept relieving each other until basically the job was finished.
SM. When you say the job was finished—how do you determine that you’re at that point?
Winkler. It’s done at a command level. But there’s a point where you switch from rescue to recovery. And then there’s a point where you say, it’s just not safe to put anybody in there. We had some victims that we had identified where they were, but it was just too dangerous to get them out. Then the building was imploded to prevent anybody else from getting hurt or killed.
SM. Thinking about that experience, what were some of the emergency response lessons that you came away with?
Winkler. The biggest lesson that I came away with is what I implemented on 9/11… The plane struck the tower, so I went down at the back from the ESU truck, and I became Truck One…which was really the incident commander. I was running that location. My goal was to have all the ESU teams responding to me, and I would put them on my teams.
We knew we had three stairwells, and we had to get into the North Tower. Each team would be outfitted, and their job was to get to those who needed them the most. I would keep track of those teams, you know, on the move. Then the South Tower got hit, so we started deploying teams ultimately into both towers.
But we had control of the teams. We knew who were on our teams. We knew where they were, and each team had a job mission. And we had good comms. We were all working through what we call point-to-point channels.
That was the plan and was going to continue until…nobody anticipated, I didn’t anticipate the buildings collapsing. My biggest concern was, how are we going to get to the people that were above the impact zones?
You also learn that when you’re in an event like that, you have to have a buddy system. If you have a team and you have six people on your team and you decide to go take a break, you make sure that somebody on your team—your buddy—knows that you’re going to do that.
We saw in 9/11 a lot of first responders who, for whatever reason, left their group. And now there was concern that they may have been trapped. We spent a lot of time looking for people who just decided to go take a break—go to the restroom, get a cup of coffee. So, buddy systems are very important.
These are the things that I would tell people afterwards in training. Good command structure, good communications, and knowing who your partner is. Those all lead to successes.
SM. What’s the most important thing you think to communicate to people about the Oklahoma City bombing?
Winkler. The fact that it can happen anywhere. It was probably something that was considered not even a target or a soft target. But it was post-World Trade Center attack in ’93. We should have been a little bit raised up.
Government buildings have been a little more hardened…but it was an opportunity for somebody like Timothy McVeigh and whoever else he was working with. They saw that this was a soft target, with a lot of impact.
SM. You’re in private security now. Is there anything from your ESU days that’s carried over into how you approach your corporate security role?
Winkler. Critical thinking. You train—you don’t train for the big one, but those little ones give you the skill-set to handle the big one, no matter what that is.
And rank is not necessarily a prerequisite for leadership. When we were in ESU, you’re expected to be a leader. And it really goes down to critical thinking.
SM. Is there anything else you’d like to share with our audience?
Winkler. It was an experience I wish I didn’t have to have. But I learned a lot. I have great admiration for the people of Oklahoma City for how they dealt with that—their outpouring, their volunteerism, supporting us, and all the teams that were there. It’s really almost like they took us into their home. They fed us, the clothed us, and everything you could ask for.
The panel discussion “Thirty Years Later: The Oklahoma City Bombing and Lessons Learned from the Response,” will be held on 18 April 2025 at 6:00 p.m. ET at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York City. A free livestream of the discussion will be available for viewers to watch here: https://911memorial.org/watch
