‘I Think We’ve Just Been Bombed’

I was on the phone talking to Dave Trimmer in our downtown office when the pipe bomb detonated at The Spokesman-Review’s Valley office.

Reaction to the explosion was almost an afterthought in my conscious. The bang was loud, certainly, like something heavy being dropped that caused the building to vibrate, but from where I sat, not particularly frightening.

Our editor, Mike Schmeltzer, got the worst of it. The pipe bomb went off in the doorway directly below where he sits. The force lifted him out of his chair, knocked a screen protector from his computer and jumbled things on his desk.

Turning to look out the windows I saw smoke rise past them and watched colleague Marny Lombard duck to the ground, worried about the potential of shattering glass.

“I think we’ve just been bombed,” was my casual comment to Trimmer.

“I guess you’d better hang up and get outside,” he answered.

Wise counsel. When smoke seeped through the floor in front of me, I figured it might be serious.

In the southeast stairwell, the force of the concussion caused sheetrock to push nails as much as one-half inch out of the studs.

The metal door into the basement was bent hideously inward. The door to the stairs would no longer latch. Two windows were blown out.

Fortunately those in the basement, the real heroes, escaped upstairs. No one in the building was harmed.

After calling home to let loved ones know we were all right, we exited the office.

Once outside we all agreed that in the melee, our journalistic instincts took a back seat. Instead of reporting on an act of terrorism, we were its object. The shoe was on the other foot.

Part of it was because the attack was over quickly. None of us witnessed anything other than the result. As citizens, rather than reporters angling for an exclusive, we left a typewritten message where it lay for law enforcement officials.

How easy, we would say later, it would have been to grab this bit of evidence and make a photocopy before they arrived.

The next day we were able to talk, even joke about the incident, yet it was really no laughing matter. On Tuesday, each bang of a carpenter’s hammer or slam of a door brought jumpy reactions.

What more, we said, could we have done. Why would the Valley office be the target.

Why, I ask myself, did I react so casually to potential danger?

In retrospect, it was fortunate those basement doors were closed. Who knows what damage may have been done to the building, or injuries incurred, by a blast unimpeded?

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