TERROR IN OKLAHOMA CITY : Threats, Evacuations Bring Oklahoma Outrage Home : Mood: Frightened workers flee O.C. offices after bomb warnings from FBI. Many parents pick up children from center similar to one struck by terrorist blast.

Maria Sciocchetti was coming out of the ladies’ room Wednesday morning when a man grabbed her by the arm and told her to run for her life, a bomb was set to go off.

Like many women who work in the Santa Ana building that houses the FBI, Sciocchetti’s first thought was not for her safety, but for her purse.

“This is weird,” she said, clutching the rescued purse in a parking lot across the street. “You see this kind of thing on the news, but you never think. . . .”

Sciocchetti was one of hundreds of evacuated workers who didn’t think--didn’t dream--that Wednesday’s tragedy in Oklahoma City could spread here so quickly.

Fixing breakfast, driving to work, they heard and saw the first dreadful bits of news: Car bomb. Federal building. Scores dead.

Few imagined that a contagion of copycat bomb threats would hit office buildings in Orange County and the nation, forcing workers everywhere to feel the day’s news with special force.

In Laguna Niguel, panicked parents dropped everything and hurried to retrieve their children from the Ziggurat Child Development Center, a day-care center on the third floor of the Chet Holifield federal building.

Day-care officials called parents of the 178 children in their charge to tell them that the Oklahoma bombing had claimed at least 17 children at a similar center.

“It scared the heck out of me,” said Ann Williams, a young mother who came at once to pick up her 2-year-old son, Trevor, and left with him cradled in her arms.

Debby Howell, a lawyer, came for her 8-month-old son, Peter, with whom she intended to spend a quiet day at home. “I couldn’t work and think that he’s at risk because he’s in a federal building,” she said.

Her sense of relief could only be freshened by the sight of anguished parents in Oklahoma, interviewed throughout the afternoon on live TV.

Right behind Howell was Kim Cahill of San Clemente, who came for her son Ryan, also 8 months old.

“I’m just playing it safe,” said Cahill, 36. “This is really just a precaution, but I’m taking off for the rest of the day.”

The day’s events posed a dilemma for these and other parents, who had always thought the federal building in Laguna Niguel was a fortress where they could deposit their children without a second thought.

“My husband and I are going to talk about it tonight,” Cahill said.

“You think you’re safe with the FBI in your building,” said Sciocchetti, in Santa Ana. “Now I don’t know.”

As a property manager for SBD Group, a company with offices in the threatened Santa Ana building, Sciocchetti guessed that 200 people work around her every day, most of them strangers.

Minutes after the bomb threat, however, strangers were forging fast friendships in a crowded parking lot across the street, as FBI agents conducted a nerve-racking building search with bloodhounds.

Kristine Ouellette, 28, said she was sitting at her desk when the FBI first burst in.

“We’re FBI agents, there’s been a bomb threat, this is serious, just get out,” she recalled them barking. “No one was panicking or anything, but we got out of there real quick.”

On the contrary, Sciocchetti said there was plenty of panic on her floor.

“Definite panic, a state of shock,” she said.

The panic only grew as news helicopters began their circular, vulture-like vigil overhead, and FBI agents turned their trained eyes on the frightened receptionists and federal employees, scanning the crowd for suspicious characters.

Suddenly, a man was spotted peering down on the scene from the fourth-story roof of a parking garage across the street. FBI spokesman Gary Morley demanded to know instantly who the man was.

An agent at Morley’s elbow whispered that the man was just a curious janitor, trying to gain a better view of unfolding events.

Accurate information was in short supply, but cigarettes and nervous laughter were plentiful in the parking lot. Some saw the scare as a chance to take an extra long lunch break. Others whispered and stood in ragged single file, as if the bomb threat were nothing more than an extension of the old elementary school fire drill.

One woman took the opportunity--since all her co-workers were gathered round--to collect signatures on a get-well card for her boss in the public defender’s office. Given the size of the captive audience, that under-the-weather public defender is apt to think an awful lot of people have been worried sick about his welfare.

“The first day I can take my car in for work and I’m waiting out here,” fumed Paul McBride, who fretted aloud to co-workers from the public defender’s office about his Acura Integra.

After FBI agents emerged from the building and gave the “all clear” sign, they announced that the parking garage was still off limits.

“How nervous are we going to be when we go start our cars tonight?” Barbie Stoddart asked her friends rhetorically.

Thinking of his Acura, McBride seemed inconvenienced and annoyed--until someone told him how many children had died in the Oklahoma City bombing.

“The idea that someone would do something like that,” he mumbled, staring at the ground.