TERROR IN OKLAHOMA CITY : Bombing Was Shocker, Even to FEMA Chief : Relief: Witt had coordinated emergency activities for more than 62 disasters. But this time he was accompanied by anti-terrorist experts.

During his two years as administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, James Lee Witt has presided over 62 disasters: fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes.

But he had never seen anything like what he saw here Thursday: a disaster caused not by nature but by “somebody meaner than hell.”

“People really have a hard time understanding why something like this would happen,” Witt said about the bombing of the federal building here that killed at least 52 people, including 12 children.

Witt was the top federal official on the scene, dispatched by President Clinton to coordinate the emergency response--from arranging for six search and rescue teams to fly in from both coasts to ordering up dozens of telephones to assist the FBI in tracking down leads. He also reportedly was preparing for an expected visit by Clinton to Oklahoma City on Sunday.

Surveying the damage in his customary cowboy boots and jeans, the Arkansas native described the scene as “devastating.”

The explosion left a crater eight feet deep and 30 feet wide in front of the federal building and caused structural damage as far as three blocks away, Witt said. The downtown area was cordoned off Thursday by National Guard troops.

Witt said that because of the need to preserve evidence, federal investigators were sifting through the debris by hand.

When Witt went looking for space to house FEMA workers, a local real estate worker told him: “One of the problems is finding a building that doesn’t have its windows blown out.”

The bomb also had taken an emotional toll on the community, Witt said.

“It’s totally disrupted the whole city,” he said. “The city is in shock. . . . It’s just really hard to deal with it . . . why something like this would happen in the United States.”

“This is worse than anything you’ve ever seen,” added Witt’s press aide, Morrie Goodman. “It’s like Beirut.”

For Witt, the Oklahoma City bombing was unlike the series of disasters that have hit Southern California, which required FEMA to get hundreds of millions of dollars into the hands of disaster victims. Witt’s job in Oklahoma City was largely to coordinate the response by 27 federal agencies, including arranging for the delivery of everything from brooms to body bags.

Witt had just returned to Washington from Alabama--where he had been discussing the federal response to a tornado that had hit that state--when he was ordered by the President to head to Oklahoma City.

From the minute he boarded a plane out of Washington, Witt said, he knew this disaster was different. He had never flown to the scene of a disaster before with anti-terrorist experts.

He arrived late Wednesday and toured the devastation into the early morning hours Thursday. Later Thursday, Witt raced between meetings with disaster and law enforcement officials, press briefings and visits to emergency operations centers. He also spoke by phone with White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta.

One of his most important acts was to order in search and rescue teams.

Some of the same teams in Oklahoma City had been on hand at the Northridge Meadows Apartments, where 16 people died during the 1994 earthquake. Witt noted that the teams, each consisting of about 50 workers, use dogs and listening devices to try to find people buried under debris.

Witt said that the rescue crews are expected to take four to six days before they complete a search of the entire nine-story federal building, which he described as pancaked.