At the point this photo was taken, several days worth of debris had been removed. The crater had pretty much been covered in for the sake of bringing in those heavy cranes If you ever run across a photo which shows the crater you are describing I would appreciate it if you would provide a link, an address, or post a copy on FR. I have looked at many photos of the Murrah Building and I have not yet seen a photo of a crater as you described it. A picture would be worth a thousand words.
I will attempt to locate one. But this I know. It was large. As I have said before, I stood at the lip of that crater. I was amazed by the size of it. And that was after rubble had collapsed back into it. Even then, it was still big. I would guess, (and I am going back 7 years in my mind) that it was maybe, 15-20 wide, and 30-40 feet long. And maybe, 8-10 feet deep. Deep enough that a man standing in the bottom could not look straight out. He would have been below street level. I just remember being in awe looking at the hole, and the destruction to the building. The crater was massive.
A picture would be worth a thousand words. Apparently, you never saw the photos of the crater that I published in the OKBIC Report -- or those same photos I posted here on FR. Unforunately, the new webmaster for the OKBIC website, where I had those photos stored for display, bollixed up the webspace directories, so my old FR links no longer work.
I am working on re-establishing those images in my own webspace, so I can, once again, display them here on FR for all to see. For now, here is a photo of the crater, taken shortly before noon (observe the sun/shadow angle) on 4/19/95:
Note that, not long after yukonG stood on the lip of the crater and made his observations, the crater was filled with reddish, muddy water from a water line leak uphill from the crater.
(Displaying full size images slows these threads down too much. I'm working on establishing a link so you can access the full size images by clicking on the .5X versions I plan to post on FR.)