Oklahoma City Bombing Research Articles

Immediate and evolving emotions among directly exposed survivors 7 years after the Oklahoma City bombing

The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 was one of the most devastating incidents of terrorism in America at that time. Existing research has not examined changes in emotional responses outside of psychopathology to disaster over time. The sample for this study consisted of adult participants randomly selected from a state registry of survivors who were directly exposed to the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City. The Disaster Supplement to the Diagnostic Interview Schedule was used to collect participants’ demographic information and qualitative details of their disaster experience, perceptions, and feelings. A total of 315 items resulted from the coding of responses pertaining to emotions (125 immediately after the disaster event, 140 in the following week, and 50 at approximately seven years postdisaster). The most common emotions in the immediate postdisaster period were shock, fear, and anxiety. In the following week, the most common were sorrow and anger. At seven years, sorrow was the most frequently expressed of all emotions. Understanding the progression of these feelings across time enhances the ability to anticipate responses at different postdisaster timeframes and to intervene in a timely manner.

A Qualitative Narrative Study of Rescue and Recovery Workers Responding to the Terrorist Bombing of Oklahoma City's Murrah Building.

Much of disaster mental health research uses quantitative methods, focusing on numerical prevalence, services, and outcomes. Qualitative methods can provide more detailed, rich, and spontaneous insights into personal disaster experiences, yielding important insights beyond deductive methods. This large-scale qualitative narrative study examined experiences of 181 Oklahoma City bombing rescue/recovery workers. Thematic narrative content of the bombing experience arose from personal accounts of the bomb blast by rescue/recovery workers proceeding chronologically from initial awareness and deployment to harrowing onsite search and rescue/recovery missions to the aftermath with reflections on the bombing. Beyond disaster recovery/rescue worker stories published in popular media, little other substantive published knowledge on this topic is available, and therefore this research study provides a wealth of new in-depth information that can provide guidance for policy and practice for disaster response.

No Victims Without Sacrifice, No Sacrifice Without Victims: Conceptualizing Violence and the “Oklahoma City Bombing”

AbstractThis article proposes a conceptualization of violence that builds on a tripartite relationship between violence, victims, and sacrifice that frames violence as a self-justifying sacrificial act. This conceptualization delineates the nature of violence by addressing its transformation from an instrumental act to a constitutional act, making violence possible, ongoing, contagious, and productive. In particular, I argue, with the help of René Girard’s theoretical framework, that conceptual accounts of violence can gain further insights through an engagement with his concepts of sacrifice and victims. Violence, this article illustrates, becomes a societal feature by producing victims via sacrifice rather than drawing simplified boundaries between the relation of perpetrator and victim, mediated by the act of violence. To illustrate the epistemological value of this conceptualization, the article re-examines Timothy McVeigh’s justification of his Oklahoma City bombing. The article concludes that not only terrorism’s atrocities reflect this proposed conceptualization of violence but also potentially all acts of political violence.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum: Materiality, Trauma, and the Comfort of Catharsis

This essay analyzes the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, focusing on embodied material simulation. I argue that the museum constructs an idealized Oklahoman citizen who works to curb anxieties surrounding domestic threats. The museum mobilizes ideal citizenship through its affective storytelling that functions to traumatize visitors to establish catharsis, which in turn invites visitors to place the blame of domestic terrorism solely on Timothy McVeigh. The rhetorical act of catharsis stunts the community’s ability to challenge the rise of domestic terrorism that has been plaguing the United States long after the Oklahoma City bombing.

Questioning Strategies in Courtrooms

This paper attempts to explore the different strategies of questioning in courtroom discourse, by highlighting the various discursive structures employed to form a question between courtroom interlocutors. More specifically, this research looks at the techniques employed in courtroom cross-examination to persuade the judge(s) to accept attorneys' accounts of what happened as well as the effectiveness of responses in fending off the influence and power of barristers. The corpus of this study is taken from 3 testimonies of prosecution witnesses in the trial of Timothy McVeigh concerning the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1997. By employing both quantitative and qualitative methods, the study investigates six questioning patterns, including wh-questions, yes-no questions, tag questions, so-questions, say-questions, and declarative questions. The study reveals that some types of questions used in courtrooms are strategically utilized to persuade juries and judges, confirm a piece of information, clarify an argument, threatening witnesses’ face, manipulate and/or coerce interlocutors within courtrooms. The paper also reveals that questioning is not only used to instigate an answer or a response but also to communicate information and draw conclusions.

A longitudinal study of Oklahoma City bombing rescue and recovery responders providing qualitative introspections of their experience nearly a quarter century later.

The 1995 terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City provided a particularly useful research opportunity. It was the most severe incident of terrorism on American soil at the time. Prior research on rescue and recovery workers responding to such events has been largely limited to early post-disaster periods, most focusing on psychopathology such as post-traumatic stress disorder. This incident provided a unique unrealized opportunity to examine long-term psychosocial effects on first responders studied longitudinally over decades after the event, using qualitative methods to yield rich, in-depth observations. A volunteer sample of 181 volunteer first responders for the Oklahoma City bombing was initially assessed 3 years after the bombing, and 124 (70 percent of those documented to still be alive) participated in longitudinal follow-up interviews an average of 23-24 years after the incident. The follow-up study included open-ended, nondirected qualitative interviews of the workers' personal disaster narratives. The experience of providing rescue and recovery efforts after the Oklahoma City bombing had lasting effects on these first responders' personal and professional relationships. It taxed their coping skills, elicited an enduring resilience, and permanently altered their outlook on life. Unlike the directly exposed survivors, these first responders found meaning and affirmation in their professional service, reaffirming their original motivations to be part of a helping profession that in today's world now requires recovery and rescue work in major terrorist incidents. Even though the work was very gruesome and taxing, more than two decades later, these workers expressed pride in their participation and had no regrets about it. The Oklahoma City bombing experience was life-changing for first responders, setting a standard for those who will follow in their footsteps. Continuing to conduct this line of work in the decades to follow reflected a conviction that their continued service honored both survivors and members of their profession. Despite the positive aspects of their perspectives on their experience, the attention they received to their emotional and psychological processing and recovery was limited, implying the importance of additional development and research on assistance to these needs.

A Prospective Post-disaster Longitudinal Follow-up Study of Emotional and Psychosocial Outcomes of the Oklahoma City Bombing Rescue and Recovery Workers During the First Quarter Century Afterward.

Little prospectively assessed post-disaster longitudinal research has been done on mental health (MH) outcomes of disaster rescue and recovery workers. This longitudinal prospective study, which is examining first responders to a terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City after nearly a quarter century, was conducted to investigate their long-term MH outcomes using full diagnostic assessments. This will most accurately inform planning for longitudinal MH care needs. Longitudinal follow-up interviews of 124 rescue and recovery workers, from an original volunteer sample of 181 volunteer workers, were completed 3 years after the bombing, and reassessed 23 years after using consistent research methods. Structured diagnostic interviews were conducted at both assessments, but these were limited to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) with additional questions about alcohol use, problems, and major psychosocial problems of life at follow up. Initially, the rescue and recovery workers had a lower prevalence of post-disaster PTSD and MDD than directly exposed survivors. They also showed higher rates of PTSD than MDD. However, over time, PTSD increased a little while MDD increased 4-fold though fewer than 50% of the cases were remitted. Low remission and increasing MDD provide incentives for surveillance and availability of treatment for decades after disaster, regardless of whether they were pre-existing conditions or disaster related.

Making Meaning of Surviving the Oklahoma City Bombing Seven Years Later

Objective: No previous studies examined how survivors made meaning (i.e. interpreted the personal significance) of a disaster experience after seven years. This qualitative study follows up on a previously published analysis of 182 directly-exposed survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing, assessed after six months had elapsed for bombing-related psychopathology and meaning-making processes. The current study examines how 113 survivors (62% follow-up rate) made meaning of their bombing experience after seven years. Method: Survivors answered questions about the effects of the bombing on their beliefs and perspectives. Their responses were hand recorded by interviewers and transcribed. Content was coded into themes, allowing codes of multiple themes. Excellent interrater reliability was obtained (Cohen’s kappa≥.8). Results: The survivors were 50% (57/113) male, 93% (105/113) Caucasian, 34% (38/113) college educated, and 71% (80/113) married with a mean (SD) age of 42.5 (10.6) (range = 19-69) years at the time of the bombing. Eight themes emerged and indicated that survivors matured in personal goals and character, interpersonal relationships, and philosophical thought (e.g., reconsideration of human nature and religion). More than one third of the comments included negative remarks about personal harm, especially psychological effects. Conclusions: Nearly two thirds of the material was positive in tone and consistent between six months and seven years. Negative content was entirely new relative to six-month baseline interview responses, suggesting many survivors incorporate greater reflection on negative outcomes in meaning-making processes over time. After several years, clinicians could encourage survivors to integrate positive and negative consequences as meaning. Longer-term studies are needed.

The effects of terrorism events and changes in the US Homeland Security Advisory System on national park visitation

ABSTRACT The impacts of terrorism events and the subsequent Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS) on visitation to US National Park Service (NPS) sites are examined. A spatial random effects model, using a panel of monthly site visitation (1979–2013), spanning the period between two major terrorism events, is applied. Results show increased visitation after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, but a decrease in visitation after 9/11. The decline in park visitation diminishes the farther the park site is from the twin towers, and the more time has passed since 9/11. Elevated terrorism threat levels under HSAS have a negative impact on visitation, but the impact of the warning decays over time. The interaction effect indicates that large visitation sites close to the Twin Towers may experience more visitation after the HSAS level increases. We suggest that the negative HSAS time effect may be due to some potential visitors choosing to stay home, while the positive interaction effect may indicate substitution towards visiting NPS sites.

A Prospective Longitudinal Study of Qualitative Disaster Narratives of Highly Trauma-Exposed Survivors of the Oklahoma City Bombing Nearly a Quarter Century Later

Objective: To examine highly trauma-exposed survivors of the 1995 Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing nearly a quarter century later, focusing on survivors’ immediate personal experiences of it through open-ended narratives. Methods: An original sample of 182 bombing survivors, studied approximately 6 months post bombing, was randomly selected from a state registry of 1,092 bombing survivors, with 71% participation. Of the original 182 bombing survivors, 103 completed the longitudinal follow-up, conducted at a median of 23 years post bombing. Qualitative data for the follow-up study were collected using an expanded version of the Disaster Supplement to the Diagnostic Interview Schedule. Of the original sample, 39 were known to be deceased, 25 could not be located, and 15 declined participation. Results: In all, 12 themes were identified, but just 3 (Locations, Bombing experience, and Initial actions) are detailed here. All survivors were in heavily damaged buildings (about one-half in the Murrah Federal building) or directly outside, and the majority (84%) were injured. They described intense and gruesome experiences of the bombing, difficult efforts to escape to safety and help other survivors, and continuing postbombing experiences once outside. Conclusions: A striking finding was the intensity of the survivors’ memories almost a quarter century after the bombing. Their sensory recollections remained vivid, generally as bright and intense as in earlier reporting periods. It may be that the salience of this extreme event stabilized memories of it yielding such vivid descriptions nearly a quarter century later.

A Qualitative Longitudinal Study of Workplace Issues, Authorities and Media, and Relationships Recounted by Oklahoma City Bombing Survivors After Nearly a Quarter Century.

The aim of the study is to examine the long-term course of disaster-related experience among survivors of a terrorist bombing and the long-term recollection of initial workplace effects across nearly a quarter century. From an initial randomly selected sample of highly trauma-exposed survivors of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, 103 participated in qualitative open-ended interviews about their bombing experience approximately 23 years after disaster. The survivors described their bombing experience clearly with extensive detail and expression of persistent strong emotion. Their discussions reflected findings from earlier assessments and also continued over the course of the next decades to complete their stories of the course of their occupational and interpersonal postdisaster journeys. Long-term psychosocial ramifications in these survivors' lives continue to warrant psychosocial interventions, such as occupational and interpersonal counseling.

A Qualitative Longitudinal Study of Injuries and Medical Care, Assistance, and Losses Recounted by Oklahoma City Bombing Survivors after Nearly a Quarter Century.

Terrorist incidents occur with alarming frequency. Much is known about acute injuries and psychopathology arising from terrorism, as well as medical care and functional status assessed in early post-disaster periods. Survivors' memories of these experiences may change over subsequent decades, and their perspectives may evolve. Little information is available on how survivors describe these experiences decades later. This longitudinal qualitative study of directly-exposed survivors of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was conducted nearly a quarter century after the disaster. It collected systematic, open-ended descriptions of survivors' injuries and medical care, assistance received and given, and disaster-associated losses. It sought to illuminate whether survivors recall long-term consequences of disaster exposure so long after the event, providing important details with great clarity and associated emotion, or alternatively lose memory and sharpness of recollection for these aspects of their bombing experience. A sample of 182 bombing survivors was randomly recruited from a state registry of 1,092 bombing survivors and interviewed at approximately six months after the bombing (71% participation). The sample was re-interviewed an average of 23 years after the disaster (72% follow-up participation) using an open-ended interview with survivors describing in their own words their personal experience of the bombing and its effects on their lives. The interviews were audio recorded and professionally transcribed. Themes were identified in the text of the interviews, and passages were coded using qualitative software, achieving excellent inter-rater reliability for each theme. This article covers three of twelve total themes identified. Nearly a quarter century after the bombing, this highly trauma-exposed Oklahoma City bombing survivor sample had memories that were still vivid, graphic, and evocative. They described injuries and medical care, assistance given and received, and losses with great detail and intensity. Despite the continuing strong emotions expressed by these survivors in relation to the bombing, the qualitative content suggested that lasting psychopathology was not a central concern. This is one of the longest prospective longitudinal, qualitative studies ever conducted with highly trauma-exposed survivors of a terrorist bombing. These findings are critical to disaster emergency response and effective management of the disaster response and early care for the survivors, as the effects of the disaster may shape the rest of their lives.

A Qualitative Study of Immediate and Evolving Reactions of Directly-Exposed Survivors of the Oklahoma City Bombing

This study's purpose was to learn about survivors' raw personal experiences of the Oklahoma City bombing in terms of reported actions, thoughts, and feelings, and to examine the evolution of their feelings with the passage of time, post-disaster. A randomly selected sample of 182 directly-exposed survivors of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing were interviewed approximately six months after the disaster and asked four open-ended questions about reactions to the bombing and to reminders of it. Responses to questions were conceptually divided, providing structure for a subsequent qualitative content analysis. Initial thoughts and actions at the time of the bomb blast included efforts to make sense of what was happening and helping themselves and others to safety. Feelings evolved in type and intensity, with varied time courses. Based on these findings, responders, clinicians, and health authorities can anticipate different emotional responses over time, allowing tailoring of mental health interventions to needs.

Making Meaning of Disaster Experience in Highly Trauma-exposed Survivors of the Oklahoma City Bombing.

Survivors of disasters can be expected to form meaningful perspectives on their experiences that shape their trajectories of recovery; thus, these perspectives are important to study. If humans are naturally compelled to create meaning from traumatic experiences, the creation of meaning should be evident in survivors' discussion of the effects of the disaster in their lives. Therefore, the purpose of this study of highly trauma-exposed disaster survivors was to identify meaningful aspects or outcomes of their disaster experiences in their perspectives. This study examined a random sample (N=182) of survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing six months after the disaster using open-ended questions. Text responses (N=650) were compiled, themes identified by multiple coders, responses coded into the themes, interrater reliability established, and the themes were then interpreted. Six themes were identified and grouped into three general categories: personal aspirations (reprioritizing life and altruism and self-improvement), connection with others (a freestanding category/theme), and making meaning (appreciation for life, religion and spirituality, and contemplating life, death, and humanity), which contained the majority of the responses. The findings from this study affirm the human need to make meaning from the experience of a traumatic disaster and suggest the potential relevance to survivors' recovery of therapies based on the creation of meaning and the promotion of positive growth.

Experimental assessment of the residual capacity of axially loaded blast-damaged square RC columns

The aftermath of the Oklahoma City Bombing and the events of September 11, 2001 in the United States led to intense research into the response of infrastructure to explosion effects and the attendant risk of progressive collapse of building structures. The research has not addressed the residual capacity of blast-damaged columns. The challenge to structural engineers is determining the residual capacity of blast-damaged columns and deciding which should be demolished and which can be repaired cost-effectively. This paper presents the results of an experimental program designed to investigate the residual capacity of blast-damaged columns in the laboratory.The blast-damaged columns, from an earlier field test program, were first subjected to the design axial service load of 1000 kN. Columns capable of resisting the service load were subjected to additional lateral loading to determine their residual flexural capacity. The test results show that columns with reduced tie spacing exhibited higher post-blast residual capacity from the explosion at the same scaled distance. Also, a high axial load ratio was observed to adversely affect the flexural load capacity of the reinforced concrete columns in a numerical parametric analysis done using the finite element program LS-DYNA.

Long-Term Posttraumatic Growth in Victims of Terrorism in Spain.

BackgroundScientific literature on posttraumatic growth (PTG) after terrorist attacks has primarily focused on persons who had not been directly exposed to terrorist attacks or persons who had been directly exposed to them, but who were assessed few months or years after the attacks.MethodsWe examined long-term PTG in 210 adults directly exposed to terrorist attacks in Spain a mean of 29.6 years after the attacks (range: 2–47 years). The participants had been injured by a terrorist attack (38.6%) or were first-degree relatives of people who had been killed or injured by a terrorist attack (41.4% and 20%, respectively). They completed diagnostic measures of emotional disorders and measures of PTSD and depression symptomatology, optimism, and PTG.ResultsMultiple regression analyses revealed gender differences (women reported higher levels of PTG than did men) and a positive linear relationship between PTG and cumulative trauma after the terrorist attack. Some PTG dimensions were significantly associated with PTSD symptomatology, these associations being linear, not curvilinear. However, PTG was not associated with depression symptomatology, diagnosis of emotional disorders, age, elapsed time since the attack, or optimism. In comparison with survivors assessed 18 years after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Spanish victims of terrorism showed higher levels of appreciation of life, but lower levels of relating to others and spiritual change.ConclusionThe findings underscore the influence of gender on PTG and provide support to the hypothesis that some emotional distress may be a necessary condition of PTG. Future studies on PTG after terrorist attacks should take into consideration the characteristics of the terrorist attack itself and the contexts of violence and threat in which it occurred. The political, social, and cultural characteristics of the community affected by it and the profile and characteristics of other traumatic events suffered after the attack should also be taken into account in further research.

Lasting Cruelties

Lasting Cruelties Lyle Jeremy Rubin (bio) Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman Viking, 2021, 448 pp. On the heels of the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraqis plundered and burned government offices, banks, businesses, and hospitals. Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time, responded: While no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression and people who have had members of their family killed by that regime, for them to be taking their feelings out on that regime. And I don't think there's anyone in any of those pictures … [who wouldn't] accept it as part of the price of getting from a repressed regime to freedom. In Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, Spencer Ackerman repurposes Rumsfeld's words in his chapter on the aftermath of George Floyd's murder. That juxtaposition between post-invasion Iraq and the Black Lives Matter uprising encapsulates the thesis of Ackerman's sweeping history of America's early-twenty-first-century wars. Ackerman details not just how the reactionary mindset and methods of the War on Terror have been brought home, but [End Page 130] also how U.S.-led militarism diverts liberationist energies abroad while containing or distorting them at national borders. Ackerman begins his striking prologue with the story of what was at that point "the worst terrorist attack in American history": the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which claimed 168 lives, with hundreds of others maimed or dismembered. Its perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, was a veteran of the first Gulf War, a white supremacist, and an associate of a robust far-right network with the Christian Identity movement at its center. His two accomplices, Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, were Army pals. Yet journalists and officials were reluctant to explore the significance of these facts and instead tended to treat McVeigh as a curious loner. The days after the bombing, before McVeigh was identified as the suspect, politicians from both parties, along with FBI agents, blamed the mass murder on Muslims. (They had in mind the culprits behind the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.) One pundit claimed—;without any grounding—;that Oklahoma City was "probably considered one of the largest centers of Islamic radical activity outside the Middle East." Another called for the mass surveillance or assassination of threatening foreigners. Law enforcement recorded an uptick in instances of Islamophobic harassment nationwide. And a year later, in a prelude to the 2001 Patriot Act, Congress passed the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, authorizing the FBI and federal prosecutors to spy on and prosecute any Muslim suspected of association with "international terrorists." Ackerman goes on to chronicle the boomerang effects of militarized weaponry, tactics, and culture. In this project, Reign of Terror joins the scholarship of historians like Kathleen Belew and Karen J. Greenberg, along with many other academics and reporters cited by Ackerman. But Ackerman insists on an even more discomfiting verdict: the U.S. security Click for larger view View full resolution Donald Rumsfeld in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2005 (Jim Young-Pool/Getty Images) [End Page 131] policies that have contributed to the hollowing out of American democracy and encouraged the rise of Donald Trump and the far right are part of a longer story of domination that can be traced back to the nation's founding as a settler-colonial project and slaveholding behemoth. The title of the book itself, an explicit reference to the French Revolution, is an implicit jibe at how perseverations over the crimes of lowlier challengers can obscure the more lasting cruelties of the Global North. Ackerman's career as a journalist spans nearly the entire War on Terror. He has embedded in Afghanistan and toured Guantanamo Bay's notorious detention camp, interviewed generals like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, and played a central role in monumental scoops like the Snowden leaks. The breadth of his knowledge and experience are evident throughout Reign of Terror, which focuses primarily on political dynamics within the United States. Ackerman moves chronologically from the...

9/11 Attacks Changed Understanding of Trauma, Elevated Disaster Psychiatry

9/11 Attacks Changed Understanding of Trauma, Elevated Disaster Psychiatry

The Oklahoma City Bombing: Institutional Practices by Journalists Covering the Biggest Story of Their Lives

ABSTRACT This historical case study looks at the Oklahoma City bombing through the eyes of the local journalists who covered it. This study examined how theory concerning institutional codes and rules translated to journalism practice during an event that killed 168 people in 1995. More than 1,700 pages of transcripts of interviews with 83 local journalists were reviewed at the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum. These accounts serve as evidence of a link between professional journalism practices and the institutional rules taught in journalism schools and outlined in journalistic ethics codes. The journalists’ most powerful motivation was a sense of responsibility informed by core journalistic principles such as seeking the truth, providing accurate information, and remaining impartial and fair. The journalists spoke of following unwritten rules calling for risk-taking, emotional detachment, and stoicism. The journalists also talked about experiencing symptoms common to those suffering from trauma-and stressor-related mental disorders. The coverage also was historically significant because of how a bank loan officer’s wrenching Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of an Oklahoma City firefighter holding the body of a bloodied child augured the rise of citizen journalists and the new ethical challenges faced by mainstream media outlets in the coming Internet age.

Survivor narratives of the Oklahoma City bombing: The story over time

AbstractThe growing disaster psychiatry research literature has focused on posttraumatic stress disorder, producing little insight into subjective disaster experience. Qualitative research, especially narrative analysis, may provide in‐depth exploration of individual disaster experience and efforts to make meaning of it. Disaster narratives were collected from a random sample of 182 Oklahoma City bombing survivors 6 months after the disaster and again from 141 survivors nearly 1 year later. These narratives were examined for the evolution of recurring themes and their content over time. The content followed a natural time structure, encompassing phases of the bombing experience that were organized into three overarching categories containing individual themes: (a) experience of the bomb blast including themes of sensory experience and cognitions, (b) immediate aftermath including themes of structural damage, helping others, escape and physical injury, and (c) later reflections. The general content and focus of the narratives changed minimally between the baseline and follow‐up interviews, but there was considerable compression of detail in the follow‐up interviews. Narrative details demonstrating consistency across time may represent the most salient meaning derived from the disaster experience. These findings have potential applicability to therapeutic interventions for working with survivors of terrorism and other disasters.