On April 19, 1995, I was 300 yards north of the Ryder truck that exploded at 9:02 a.m. in Oklahoma City. Working with urban search and rescue (US&R) teams, I was tasked with creating a GIS environment for what remained of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. This effort of converting architectural floor plans into a GIS environment complete with occupant mapping and a three-dimensional model took approximately 170 man-hours in one 36-hour period. In reality, this and other crucial information was needed in the first four hours. The challenge for GIS developers is to achieve this time line and to make their technology affordable enough to be included in the preplanning process. Many view the Oklahoma City bombing as an attack on one federal building. In reality over 300 buildings were damaged and over 15 of these either collapsed or had severe structural damage. In all there were over 1,200 casualties, of which only 360 were in the federal building. Eleven US&R teams and thousands of workers responded to an evacuated and perimeter-controlled 100-square-block area. Virtually a small city within a city was established. Issues faced in this new city and that will be faced in future urban disasters include urban topography with structural elevations, interior and exterior structural change detection, perimeter control with ingress and egress, neighborhood and building modeling both before and current configurations, detection of structural integrity with load bearing components such as twisted steel or buried support columns, collapsed building interior navigation, and trapped victim locations. Are there current tools to address these issues? What available software solutions enhance our ability to prepare for, deal with, and analyze the effect of disasters such as that experienced in Oklahoma City?