A qualitative narrative study of rescue and recovery workers responding to the terrorist bombing of Oklahoma City's Murrah Building

E Whitney Pollio; Jennifer Wang; Edward Randle; David E Pollio; Carol S North

doi:10.1097/JOM.0000000000003140

A qualitative narrative study of rescue and recovery workers responding to the terrorist bombing of Oklahoma City's Murrah Building

J Occup Environ Med. 2024 May 15. doi: 10.1097/JOM.0000000000003140. Online ahead of print.

Authors

E Whitney Pollio¹, Jennifer Wang², Edward Randle³, David E Pollio⁴, Carol S North

Affiliations

¹ College of Nursing, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA.
² Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA, USA.
³ Department of Social Work, Tarleton State University, Ft. Worth, TX, USA.
⁴ Private Practice, Tampa, FL, USA.

PMID: 38748398
DOI: 10.1097/JOM.0000000000003140

Abstract

Objective: Much of disaster mental health research uses quantitative methods, focusing on numerical prevalence, services, and outcomes.

Methods: 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 OKC bombing rescue/recovery workers.

Results: 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.

Conclusions: 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.