Oklahoma City offers hope to N.Y.

Associated Press

OKLAHOMA CITY — Workers broke ground for a new federal building Tuesday, with the mayor saying he hoped the project would send a message of hope to New Yorkers recovering from the Sept. 11 attack.

"We’re farther down the road than them," Mayor Kirk Humphreys said. "We have rebuilt and they need to know, they will too."

The 3 1/2-story structure will be built just north of where the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Building stood before April 19, 1995. The building was destroyed by a fertilizer bomb concealed in a truck parked nearby by Timothy McVeigh. The blast killed 168 people and injured hundreds of others.

Former workers at the building and others who lost loved ones in the explosion attended the groundbreaking ceremony.

Sandy Cole, whose two godchildren died in the blast, said she supports the new building: "It just shows that terrorists can’t win and things do change."

The mayor acknowledged that there has been opposition to the project, but said it had the support of former President Clinton and President Bush.

"They wanted to make sure we have the victory and not the terrorists," said Humphreys, who also took New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani a seedling from the "survivor tree" — the American elm that withstood the explosion.

"I wanted him to know there was hope, that there was healing, but it is a long process," the mayor said.

The structure will be built under security guidelines drawn up after the bombing. The reinforced structure will contain explosion-resistant glass facing a courtyard that divides the building and creates an entrance into a single lobby. The structure is scheduled to be completed by September 2003.

Several agencies that were housed in the Murrah building have moved and will not return to the new federal building. McVeigh was executed in June for the bombing. Co-defendant Terry Nichols was given a life term on a federal conviction and faces a state trial on murder charges.