When yet another reporter asked him the same questions, Kluttz said "look at my jacket, read it and report it. This is what we feel about that."

The reporter turned to the camera and said "There you have it folks. Hope springs eternal here in Oklahoma City."

In spite of the help they gave in the pleas for supplies, Kluttz criticized hordes of media that converged on Oklahoma City.

"It's like these people are disaster groupies who aren't doing productive stuff. They're like the Partridge family," Kluttz says. "Sometimes I'd just lean over and say `Didn't I see you at O.J.'"

Having been at the scene of the disaster, Kluttz says he hopes officials do not release video footage of the nursery when rescue workers reach it. Officials announced yesterday that they had begun work at excavating the nursery and social security office, some of the areas most devastated by the blast.

Eerie quiet

Kluttz said one of the most unsettling aspects of the whole rescue effort in Oklahoma City was its remarkable quiet.

"There's an eerie silence. You don't really talk much because there's work to do," he recounts.

The silence, however, was not all that surprising considering the monumentally morbid task at hand.

According to Kluttz, the ordeal rescue workers faced was so traumatic that many would not go into the mass of steel and concrete without a chaplain.

Kluttz says he was particularly struck by the gruesome process of identifying the bodies, especially those of children. Since in many cases rescuers could find only pieces of bodies, some had to go to homes to do things like lift finger prints off of cribs so that identifications could be made.

According to Kluttz the rescue work was draining, even for search and rescue dogs.

"They are under psychologica: duress. They come out just wanting to lick everyone like puppies," he says of the usually ferocious canines. "Once they sensed that they didn't find what they were looking for, they felt like they had failed their owners. [The owners] would enact phony successful rescues to try to cheer them up."

The rescue exacted a physical toll on the dogs as well as they needed bandaging on their paws from the glass, concrete and nails they climbed over, Kluttz said.

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