TERROR IN OKLAHOMA CITY : Far-Off Oklahomans Feel the Shock Waves, Reach Out for Solace : Expatriates: Tragedy pulls together a national network of ex-residents. They gather for vigils and seek news from home via phone, computer.

Three agonizing days of uncertainty later, the trauma of the tragedy in Oklahoma City continues to radiate across a stunned nation. From New York to Miami to Los Angeles, in person, over the phone and through e-mail, Oklahoma’s far-flung sons and daughters maintained a vigil for the missing Friday and consoled one another in their grief.

In Washington, at a prayer service in a small church near the Capitol, Oklahomans working in Congress sang hymns, recited prayers and wept for missing friends. Republicans and Democrats embraced.

“Something like this pulls people together a lot, regardless of their political stripe,” said Bret Bernhardt, a senior aide to Republican Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma. “Everyone has someone they know who was directly or indirectly affected by this.”

In their offices in New York, at their desks in Washington agencies, in their homes on the coasts, people who grew up around Oklahoma City or attended one of the state universities have spent hours on the phones or at their computers seeking to learn whether people they know are among the missing entombed beneath the bomb-shattered rubble of the federal building in downtown Oklahoma City.

The tragedy that shocked the nation also pulled together like nothing before the far-flung diaspora of a region that has sent many of its natives east and west for careers, study or other pursuits. Frantically working networks of acquaintances, they have tried to find old classmates and friends who stayed in Oklahoma to work in “the city.”

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“There’s been an incredible amount of networking, people calling other people . . . to try to get information and figure out how to channel our resources back home to the victims,” said Kim Bayliss, a member of the Board of Governors of Washington’s University of Oklahoma alumni association.

“We’ve had alumni calling in here from all over the country trying to get information,” added Gerry Gill, executive director of the alumni association in Oklahoma City. “Most of them still can’t believe it happened here. . . . Most of them are just calling in to express their disbelief and vent their feelings.”

Oklahomans remain bound by a “strong sense of family and community,” and expatriates tend to stay in close touch with both one another and their relatives back home, said Gail Mitchell Donovan, president of the Oklahoma University Club of Greater New York.

“My husband was talking to a friend of his in Oklahoma last night and they both broke down on the phone and cried. . . . Oklahoma is a small place . . . and whether it’s a neighbor, a co-worker, a spouse, a friend or family, almost everyone has a connection to that building,” she said.

Long-distance telephone companies reported tenfold increases in calls into Oklahoma City the first two days after the bombing. “A normal day for us will bring about 100,000 call attempts into the Oklahoma City area. On the day of the bombing, that jumped to more than 1 million,” said Jim Collins, a field agent for MCI.

Frustrated by the tortuously long uncertainty over the fate of the missing, many Oklahomans said that the worst part of the ordeal for them was the helplessness that attends the waiting, the repeated phone calls and the long hours spent glued in front of television sets, hoping against diminishing odds that more of the missing will be saved.

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“I went to give blood last night. Made me feel better just to do something,” said Donovan, breaking down in tears.

In New York and elsewhere, the university clubs have become hubs of information or, more often when it is lacking, consolation for anxious callers.

In Washington, the offices of Oklahoma’s congressional delegation have been inundated with phone calls and faxes.

Fifteen federal agencies also had offices at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and at many of them workers gathered in their employee cafeterias Friday to pray for their missing colleagues.

“We had a little commemorative service today,” said Jack Flynn, a spokesman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which had 125 employees in the federal building when the bomb went off Wednesday morning. As of Friday afternoon, 35 were still missing.

“About 400 people in the cafeteria. . . . We have a lot of people with ties back there, and they just got up and spoke about the people they knew, and some of them cried, and still no one can understand it,” Flynn said. “No one can understand it.”