Anyone Listening?

A freight train barreling through Minot, North Dakota, on a frigid night in 2002 went off the tracks, causing freight cars to scatter along the rails like a loose pack of cards. Five tank cars carrying anhydrous ammonia ruptured, filling the area with a poisonous gas cloud. But a public warning over radio wasn't broadcast for nearly ninety minutes. One person died, and more than 300 were injured in the incident.

Little more than two blocks away from the derailment, Jennifer Johnson heard the crash, then watched the ammonia cloud roll toward her house. She searched in vain for information on what had happened. "The phone line was out, so I couldn't call 911," she told the Bismarck Tribune. "The only thing on the radio was music--no one was telling us what happened or what to do." She dialed through every station in town, but after an hour without hearing an announcement, she gave up and turned the radio off. "We didn't know what the chemical would do to us," she says.

What happened in Minot reflects a nationwide problem: Media consolidation has left many radio stations nearly empty at night. At the time of the accident, Clear Channel owned six of Minot's eight stations, including the designated emergency announcement station, but only one person was there during the accident and did not respond to local authorities' calls because phone lines were jammed by residents calling in. The authorities tried activating the radio's Emergency Alert System to notify the public about what to do, which can be done without station personnel, but the EAS failed. Authorities had to pull out a phonebook and call local Clear Channel employees at their homes to tell them to broadcast an emergency message.

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