COLUMN ONE : In the Eye of the Cult Firestorm : Witnesses to Koresh’s self-made apocalypse saw the ticking of the clock turn into the crackle of flames as man who called himself a savior brought his world to an end.

Hilda Cornelius wanted just one thing.

For it to end.

Two state troopers knocked on her door at 5:30 a.m. “There might be some noise,” they said. “Stay indoors.”

The troopers said FBI agents were planning to move onto David Koresh’s compound, a mile away. Cornelius and her husband, Richard, had been neighbors to a federal siege for 51 days.

“Thank God!” she muttered. “Get this thing over with.”

What she did not realize was just how fascinated Koresh was with fire. Biblical fire. Most especially, fire in the Apocalypse.

Otherwise called the Book of Revelations, the Apocalypse tells a world-ending story about seven seals. When the seals are opened, there is “hail and fire mingled with blood.” Trees burn. Grass burns. Men are tormented with “fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.”

That’s what David Koresh called himself. The Lamb.

From their porch, their yard and finally their roof, Richard and Hilda Cornelius watched in horror Monday as Koresh and his followers met with an apocalypse of their own. The Cornelius family and other witnesses to the FBI’s tear-gas attack on the Branch Davidian compound called it a particular tragedy that two dozen children in the cult apparently burned to death.

“I feel very bad for the innocent kids, that he (Koresh) had to do this to them,” Hilda Cornelius said. “He wasn’t thinking, and evidently their mothers didn’t think enough of the children.

“If it was me, I would be running with my kids.”

During the tear-gas attack, the FBI said, the Branch Davidians set fire to their own compound. The flames that ended Koresh’s world burned for only 30 minutes. His apocalypse, however, was far longer in the making.

For several weeks, the FBI had been removing cars and debris from around the compound. It reduced the cover that Koresh and his people might take if they fled. It also cleared the way for tanks to reach the compound walls.

All this made people in Waco wonder. Craig Tusa, for instance, was having trouble sleeping. He awoke around 4 a.m. Monday and pulled himself out of bed. In the hallway, he and his father, Leonard, startled each other.

“That damn helicopter has been keeping me up all night,” Tusa’s father muttered. “Maybe something is going to happen.”

Tusa, 23, a paramedic, went back to bed. But the telephone rang at 6:45 a.m. It was a dispatcher at his company, American Medical Transport. “I need to let you know something is going on at the compound,” the dispatcher said.

“I was told to notify you.”

Tusa rolled out of bed again. He dressed, slipped into his boots and went to work.

At their home near the Branch Davidian compound, Hilda and Richard Cornelius made plans to hide in their back bedroom if they needed to. “It’s the safest place,” Hilda Cornelius said. “You have to go through two other rooms to get to it.

“My husband kept going out and sitting on the front porch.” Finally, he climbed onto the roof to get a better look.

Law enforcement officers already had made their final preparations.

There had been no shift change of state or federal agents surrounding the compound. Instead, only a few vehicles from the Texas Department of Public Safety had pulled up to a checkpoint on the perimeter.

At 5:55 a.m., the FBI had telephoned the compound. Steve Schneider, a member of the Branch Davidians, answered. He was told to pass the word: Give up--or be tear-gassed.

Schneider hung up, according to FBI spokesman Bob Ricks.

“Take cover,” a state trooper warned the reporters, camped out about two miles away--as close as agents would let them get.

“It’s coming down.”

The FBI had rigged an M60 armored vehicle with a steel boom. Ricks described it as an armored combat engineering vehicle. On the vehicle, agents attached a system called a “Mark 5,” designed to fire eye-stinging gas.

The gas is called CS. Ricks said that neither the Mark 5 system nor the tear gas could cause or contribute to a fire.

Then the FBI outfitted the M60 with the Stars and Stripes.

They sent it straight toward the compound. Unlikely as an anteater with a metal nose, the M60 began ripping holes into one of the buildings. Some of the holes were large enough to be seen by the reporters, two miles away.

David Koresh and his people replied. They fired an initial volley of 75 to 80 rounds. The FBI said it did not return the fire. Instead, the M60 shot round after round of tear gas into the compound. It filled the clear morning air with an eye-burning mist.

Inside, Ricks said, Davidian members had enough gas masks for adults. The FBI had said previously that it was reluctant to use tear gas because of the risk to children. Agents, Ricks said now, hoped that “the motherly instinct would take place,” and children would be allowed to go free.

But none were.

“Apparently,” Ricks declared, “the (Branch Davidians) don’t care about their children, and that is unfortunate.”

As bullets from the compound rattled off the sides of the M60, federal agents shouted at the top of their lungs through loudspeakers:

“This is not an assault. Do not fire!

“If you fire, your fire will be returned. We are introducing non-lethal tear gas.

“Exit the compound now and follow instructions. You are responsible for your own actions. Come out now, and you will not be harmed.

“You will be provided medical attention. Come out, and you will be treated professionally. No one will be injured. Submit to proper authorities. Do not subject yourself to any more discomfort.”

Other armored vehicles joined the M60. A school bus rumbled up. So did ambulances. One was Craig Tusa’s--it had taken him little more than half an hour to arrive.

His ambulance carried a team of three.

Tusa had not bothered to listen to the radio on the way out.

He knew in his bones what was happening. “We were aware they were going to gas the place and continue to gas the place. We figured today had to be the day.” But he said nobody had figured the way it would turn out.

“We expected it to be a lot of aggravated people, especially the kids,” he said. “We were ready for a lot of respiratory patients.”

Tusa’s ambulance parked at a medical staging area about a mile from the compound. He watched through a telescope as the steel boom on the M60 with its Mark 5 system reached into a second-floor window.

The tank tore down a wall. It punched a hole in the roof.

From his own roof not far away, Richard Cornelius shouted down to his wife with each new development. “Oh!” he yelled. “They pulled down the wall!”

The M60 and the other armored vehicles rammed the sides of Koresh’s buildings with an unrelenting pounding. They went on ramming and ramming and ramming most of the morning. They opened more large holes in the walls.

The idea, said Charles Mandigo, an FBI spokesman, was to provide some way to shoot tear gas directly into the buildings.

At the same time, he said, the holes would provide a way for the Branch Davidians to flee.

“This is a way of sending a message that this is not going to go on forever, that the time has come to bring this to a conclusion,” Mandigo said.

“It was carefully crafted to prevent injury.”

Ricks said authorities believed that tear-gassing the compound was the best way to avoid any attempt at mass suicide.

Nonetheless, Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center, the main trauma center in the area, was put on a low-level alert.

At the same time, Dallas’ Parkland Hospital, where President John F. Kennedy died, was contacted by the FBI. What kind of helicopters could its trauma center accommodate? How many? What if the chopper was an Army Huey?

As the ramming went on and on, with a letup now and then, gunfire from inside the compound ricocheted off the armored vehicles.

Agents worried. They knew the cult owned a .50-caliber weapon. A round in the right place might do enough damage to harm the people inside. The Branch Davidians fired as many as 200 rounds, estimated Ricks.

One member of the Texas National Guard was hurt, Ricks said. Otherwise, no federal agents, state troopers, police or military personnel suffered any injury.

Ricks said they were shielded from the gunfire--and not one of the officers fired back.

“We will continue to gas them and make their lives as uncomfortable as possible,” he said, “until they do exit the compound.”

He said their gas masks would lose effectiveness after about eight hours.

At midmorning, someone inside the compound hung a banner from one of the windows on the second floor.

“We Want Our Phones Fixed,” it read.

After Steve Schneider of the Branch Davidians had hung up on the FBI, someone reportedly had thrown the phone out the front door.

FBI agents tried to re-establish telephone communication, Ricks said, but they were unable to.

After the sun had been up for several hours, the ramming stopped--but only for a short time. Not long after 9 a.m., the M60 angled toward the front of the compound. It shifted gears. Then it bashed down the front door.

Suddenly, shortly after noon, came Armageddon.

Tusa saw it start through the telescope. Smoke wafted out of the second-story windows. Then it rolled out.

Richard Cornelius saw it too. Again he called down to his wife. “I went outside,” she said, “and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, the firetrucks aren’t going to get out here soon enough.’ ” She knew the smoke meant fire, and she worried that the fire might spread on the grassy plain--maybe all the way to their home.

“Standing out on the porch, you could feel the heat,” she said. “And the smoke! You could really smell the smoke. It was sort of an unreal feeling--that all of this destruction was going on right by your house.”

Wind blew across Texas like fingers from the devil’s hand, and the smoke became red-orange flames. The flames exploded into a fireball. It swallowed the buff-colored compound, made of white-shuttered yellow pine, like a red-orange monster.

Yellow pine, fire officials said, burns hot and quick. They estimated the wind at 25 miles per hour and called it south-to-southwesterly.

“That thing just burned so fast!” said Tusa, the paramedic. “The first thing that came to my mind was that it had to be an accelerant.”

One person jumped off the compound’s roof. Another ran out with his hands up. Two more emerged. David Magana, a producer for KXAS-TV in Dallas, watched through a camera lens as another appeared on the roof.

FBI agents tried to wave him down.

Magana said the man ignored them, climbed off the building and disappeared.

Moments later, the TV producer said, a woman ran out of the compound, her clothes dark and smoking.

Agents tried to rescue her. The woman fought them off.

“I don’t know if you call that devotion or stupidity,” Magana said. “In any case, it’s tragic.”

At the Fire Department in Bellmead, next door to Waco, dispatcher William Hlavenka took a call from the Texas Department of Public Safety between 12:10 and 12:15 p.m. “He said, ‘There’s a structural fire out at Mt. Carmel.’ ” The reference was to the area near Waco where Koresh had set up his compound.

“He didn’t say David Koresh specifically, but you can put two and two together,” Hlavenka said. “I knew this was it. My adrenaline started flowing.”

He alerted the two paid firefighters at the station, then paged Bellmead’s four volunteers. All four wear beepers. “They all live nearby. Everyone pretty much knew it was the compound, that this was it.

“You could feel it, just the heightened feelings.”

Within minutes, two red firetrucks from Bellmead, carrying six firefighters, were rolling fast as possible toward the blaze.

At the compound, the firefighters had problems with water pressure.

“We had to draft the water from the stock ponds,” Hlavenka said, “because we did not have the luxury of having a hydrant around. We got the water from the stock ponds, plus what was in the apparatus tanks.” That, he said, amounted to only 750 gallons in one truck and about 300 in the other.

The efforts seemed puny against such a fire.

“The wind blew on it, and it went fast,” said firefighter Steve Parrish, from Bellmead. “There was nothing but rubble left.”

Another firefighter, Monte Steunkell, also from Bellmead, said: “The only thing left standing was a concrete bunker and the water tank. It went way too quick.

“Once it went, it went.”

Bellmead Fire Chief James Karl said there was little that could be done.

“By the time we got there, everything was on the ground, smoldering and burning,” he said. “When you have a wood structure in an open area with high winds, like we had today, you’ll have a very fast-moving fire.

“While we were extinguishing what was left, we heard what might have been ammunition going off.” He said the sound came from inside the compound. On the other hand, he said, “it could have been canned food exploding.”

His men and firefighters from Waco tried to approach the blaze from the front. “We were right up to the edge,” he said. “But the thing was already on the ground. We were basically trying to put all the hot spots out and contain what was already burning, making sure it didn’t get into the fields.”

The compound, Karl said, was reduced to compact piles of charred debris. The rubble, he said, included household items, from chairs and tables to a stove. He said the stove must have been in the main living quarters.

Was anything saved?

“Not to my knowledge,” he said. “No.”

Every now and then Tusa walked into a tent at the medical staging area to check on patients. Two women were airlifted to Parkland. Tusa saw one man being stripped so he could be decontaminated of tear gas.

There was another reason for the stripping, Tusa knew. None of the paramedics wanted to be surprised by secret weapons.

One woman already had been stripped, placed under a blanket on a gurney and wheeled into Tusa’s ambulance. He climbed in back.

The woman was quiet. She would not talk unless he spoke to her first.

Tusa said she would not give her name or age. But she told him she did not have a medical history.

“She looked like she had been penned up in the compound for quiet a while,” he said.

Only nine people were known to have survived. Four of them were hospitalized with burns and broken bones. The five others were taken to the McLennan County Jail in Waco.

“It’s a bad end,” said Jack Killorin, a spokesman in Washington for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, who approved the FBI tear-gas attack, said: “Obviously, if I had thought that the chances were great for mass suicide, I would never have approved.”

The Apocalypse, to be sure, says nothing about suicide for the righteous.

“The fearful and unbelieving and the abominable and murderers and whoremongers and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars,” it declares, are the ones who “shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire.”

Times staff writers Louis Sahagun and Mark Stein in Waco, Danny Robbins in Dallas and Richard E. Meyer in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

Koresh Profile

The strong religious beliefs started at an early age for Vernon Howell, who changed his name to David Koresh as an adult. Here’s background on the cult leader:

Age: 33

Hometown: Houston

Education: Ninth-grade dropout; part of his legend is that he memorized the New Testament by age 12

Religious benchmarks: Baptized as Seventh-day Adventist in 1979; thrown out of church in 1981; At age 17, Koresh apparently joined the sect, an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventist Church; Koresh took control of the group in 1984 when the cult split into two rival factions. In 1987, Koresh and seven other members were arrested after a gun battle with the rival splinter group.

How FBI Moved In

Before fire erupted, authorities were using a modified M60 tank equipped with tear gas to flush the cult members out. Authorities, discounting the tank’s role in the fire, said a nonsparking propellent was used to deliver the gas.

The tank: Combat engineering vehicle works way around the compound, smashing holes in walls

The boom: Fires 15-second bursts of tear gas into compound. Gas is inserted using a Mark 5 system secured to boom. FBI says each burst covered about 55 square feet

The gas: A chemical agent called CS2, which the U.S. military uses to flush out enemy soldiers from tunnels. It is actually a very fine powder, rather than a gas, and stings the skin, eyes, nose and throat. It’s delivered through a tube by tanks of compressed air, which does not involve any flame or explosive.