Blast Shakes Olympic Park; 1 Killed, at Least 65 Injured

The Atlanta Olympic Games were rocked by an apparent bomb that killed one person and injured at least 65 early this morning, according to televised reports.

The explosion occurred about 1:20 a.m. EDT in Centennial Olympic Park, which is in the heart of the downtown Olympic area. The area has been drawing as many as 100,000 people each night for concerts and general celebrations. The bands have been going until 2 a.m.

NBC cameraman Mark Field said that before the blast he was warned by a security guard to move because of a “suspicious package.”

There were conflicting reports on the location of the explosion. Some said it was near the sound stage; others said it was near exhibition tents at the park.

A band called Jack Mack and the Heart Attack had just finished a song in the concert when, according to one of its musicians, Andrew Kastner, “We heard this explosion, and I just got rocked backward. Our sound engineer discovered the bomb.

“The bomb squad came and cleared out all the people from that area. A couple of policemen looked inside after a flash went off. People thought one of our electrical transformers went off, but it wasn’t anything like that.”

Dr. John Vogel, a surgeon at Emory University, confirmed one death. “There is one woman at the scene who died,” he said. “It is clear they were projectile injuries--head injuries. We attempted CPR on the woman who died. There was a delay in mobilizing assets who could help. They took help from anybody they could get.”

Vogel was standing near the stage when the explosion occurred. “There was about a second inclination to run the hell away. The first thought was, is it going to happen again? There was 10 seconds where we didn’t go anywhere. Some people required evacuation.”

Dr. David Loya, a medical volunteer, said he saw “20 to 30 people go down. Some had various penetrating neck and abdomen wounds.”

“When I first arrived, a victim was draped in a white sheet, appeared to be in full arrest--dead. It appeared at least 20 people needed ambulance transport. A lot of people needed attending to. All of them had what appeared to be some sort of shrapnel wounds.”

Loya said he saw a hole that the explosion seemed to have created at the Swatch Pavilion in the park.

“The boom sounded like lightning,” Loya said. “But it was too low to the ground to be lightning.”

One witness to the explosion, Terry Tyson, said, “I saw three guys laying in the street. They all had leg injuries. Blood was running down the street. It was horrible.”

The scene quickly became one of chaos. Those who were close to the area of the explosion gave various versions of pockets of injured people, lying on the ground and bleeding.

Jennifer Ellis of Winter Haven, Fla., here as a volunteer worker for the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, said she was on the scene and tried to help.

“I saw people laying down, little clumps of them,” she said. “It was such chaos. The man I treated had puncture wounds behind his ear and hip. He was in shock. From what I saw, there were at least 15 or 20 people laying there.”

A member of the ACOG security staff, Austin Williams of the Department of Defense, said he was on the scene and he thinks the sound he heard was some kind of package bomb.

“I heard the sound,” he said, “And I knew what it was.”

Within 15 minutes of the explosion, the area was crawling with security people, police, FBI and media people, many of whom were still working on Olympic reporting within yards of the explosion. Quickly, the Main Press Center was sealed off, one security person saying they feared that the building was in danger, and only a handful of reporters made it back into the center.

Within a half hour, security forces had a three-block area sealed off.

Centennial Olympic Park, until about four months ago a vacant, slum area of downtown Atlanta, was turned into a place of gathering and celebration by Billy Payne, ACOG president and CEO. His office on the top of the Main Press Center looks down on the corner where the apparent bomb went off.

The stunned crowd in the immediate aftermath consisted of a mix of onlookers and shocked near-victims who had been close to the explosion.

Mike Danford and his girlfriend, Kelly Beaudry of Atlanta, hugged each other, and Danford sobbed: “The world is crazy. God should just take us all away right now.”

Jason Sanders of Stone Mountain, an Atlanta suburb, said that he had been at the rock concert and that he had been told by security people just moments before the explosion that he probably better move to a “safer area.” His father, Jake, said he heard that, but before they could do anything, the “bomb went off. We saw flying glass and we just took off.”

A doctor from New York state, here just as a spectator for the Olympics, said he treated a number of people, all for shrapnel wounds.

Lisa Dillman, Mike Downey, Eric Harrison, Randy Harvey, Mike Hiserman, Robyn Norwood, Bill Plaschke and Edith Stanley contributed to this story.