''What Oklahoma City went through is going to pale in regards to the number of lives that are affected by what happened in New York City and at the Pentagon,'' police Sgt. Don Hull said. ''My heart goes out to the firefighters and the rescue workers for what they're about to endure.''

Hull and other rescue workers searched the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building for a month before they accounted for all 168 victims. At night, they searched the carnage with flashlights looking for personal belongings and body parts.

Several predicted Tuesday that it will take two months or more to recover all the victims from the World Trade Center towers. But on Tuesday, there were likely hundreds wondering whether their loved ones were somehow still alive in the wreckage of the trade center.

Kathy Wilburn, whose grandsons Chase and Colton Smith died in bombing, knows how it feels. After a day of frantic searching, her son found one of the bodies in the back of a truck filled with victims the evening of the Oklahoma City bombing.

''No one should have to go through that,'' she said. ''There are going to be people that are going to be anguishing for days and days worried if there loved one is trapped or crying for help. I think that's more than the mind can fathom.''

Oklahoma rescue officials watched hours of television about the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., their minds wandering to gruesome images of April 19, 1995.On that day, hundreds of officers drove to downtown Oklahoma City when they felt or saw the bombing.

The horror didn't sink in until later.

''You're on autopilot,'' Hull said. ''It didn't hit until you stopped doing your job. As long as you're working, you're still OK. It's when you go home in the solitude of your home and your family that you break down.''

Midwest City Assistant Fire Chief Jonathan Herndon said New York rescuers are now ''in high-gear looking for survivors.''

''When the probability of survival drops down, so will their spirits,'' he said. ''It goes from thinking about the victims to thinking, 'Now we have to find those people so that their families will have something to have a service over.'''

Paramedic Johnny Griffith stayed with one bombing survivor for five hours until she was removed. His worst memory is finding a tiny shoe and a little carton of milk that was still cold. The children in the building's day-care center were having breakfast when Timothy McVeigh parked a truck bomb outside their second-floor window.

Police Sgt. Rod Hill received a medal of honor for going back into the federal building during a second bomb scare to save two women trapped on the seventh floor. He said he thought of that as he watched on television as the Trade Center crumbled to the street.

The women Hill rescued were contemplating jumping out the window when he reached them.

''I was pretty sure I heard them amid all the panic and the screams,'' he said. ''I thought I heard them ask for help.''

Griffith said those who responded to the Oklahoma City bombing had it easier because they didn't know the victims. In New York, authorities feared some rescue workers were killed when the towers collapsed.

''My stomach has just been upside down all day,'' Griffith said. ''It's going to make Oklahoma City look like small potatoes.''