Responses to traumatic stress among community residents exposed to a traincollision

In 1996 in Stafford, UK, a collision occurred between a freight train and a post office train. While only one person died, 21 employees working on the Post office train were injured. Instead of focusing on primary victims, i. e: those on the train, or secondary victims, i.e. helpers or the significan t others of the dead and injured, the present paper focused on community re sidents who lived on both sides of the embankment where the collision occur red. There were two aims to this paper. We wished to (1) describe the degre e of traumatic stress of the community residents and (2) describe their tra umatic responses at the time and during the aftermath of the collision. The hypothesis was that there was a significant degree of traumatic stress amo ng these residents and that the greater the impact of the collision they ex perienced, the more severe their traumatic stress became. Forty-nine reside nts participated in the study and were assessed using the Impact of Event S cale (IES), the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) and the Stafford train c rash questionnaire. The results showed that among the whole sample, the res idents experienced more intrusive thoughts than avoidance behaviour, but th eir scores were significantly lower thai 2 those of the standardized stress clinic samples. Forty-one per-cent of the residents scored at or above the cutoff point of the GHQ. Two groups, high symptom and low/medium symptom g roups, were then divided, according to the cutoff of the IES, and compared. The results shows that the high symptom group scored significantly higher in the sub-scales of the IES, and the GHQ. There was indeed a tendency that the greater the impact of the collision residents experienced, the more se vere the distress was. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.