mediacrit.com

The first thing people in Minot, North Dakota noticed after a series of earth-shaking booms, was the burning sensation in their throats and the overpowering odor of ammonia.

Sometime after 1 a.m. on January 18, 2002, a train derailed, spilling 210,000 gallons of liquid anhydrous ammonia farm fertilizer, which immediately vaporized into the frigid air and spread over the city of 36,600 in a toxic white cloud.

Anhydrous ammonia delivers caustic burns when it comes in contact with body tissue. A blast to the face can swell the throat shut, suffocating the victim, or touch the eyes and cause blindness.

That night, one 38-year-old man died when he walked outside and was overcome by the ammonia gas in his front yard. More than one thousand people received medical aid, and thirty-two were hospitalized, some in intensive care units. In the weeks afterward, hundreds of residents returned to hospitals for more testing to assess the long-term damage to their lungs.

Normally, in an emergency situation, citizens would tune into their radios to learn about what happened and get safety instruction. But when local police tried to reach the city’s six commercial radio stations early that morning no one answered. All of the stations were on automation, playing music through the night with no live deejays. The six stations started emergency broadcasts only after safety officials were able to reach station employees at home.

The owner of those six commercial stations (there is also a public radio station and a Christian radio station in Minot) is Clear Channel, the San Antonio-based corporation that is the largest owner of radio stations in the U.S., with now nearly 1,400 stations and about 110 million listeners. Clear Channel claims there was one employee on duty overseeing the automated operations, but he didn’t answer the phone.

The train disaster in Minot has since become the prime example of the dangers of lost localism in radio, particularly after nearly all government limits on radio station ownership were removed in 1996. Since that time, large radio corporations like the enormously profitable Clear Channel have grown to dominate radio airwaves in markets across the country, typically dropping news programs, laying off DJs, and piping in content from centralized studios.

We can take some consolation in Eastern Iowa that we don’t have it as bad as Minot. Although there is clearly less localism in radio and TV than a decade ago, in our own recent storm and flood disasters, the some broadcast media still fared well. The weakest television response was by KGAN in Cedar Rapids, which has suffered the most severe cuts by a distant corporate owner with a questionable dedication to journalism (Sinclair Broadcasting, the same company that pulled Nightline from its ABC stations the night Ted Koppel solemnly read the names of U.S. citizens killed in Iraq). CBS2, as they like to be called these days, responded with a text crawl of weather warnings at the bottom of their regular programming.

On the plus side, KCRG in Cedar Rapids and KWWL in Waterloo put in impressively long hours of nonstop storm reporting. KCRG is owned by the Gazette company of Cedar Rapids. KWWL is owned by Raycom of Montgomery, Alabama, and although it has suffered some significant personnel cuts in recent years, it still knows how to cover a big weather story. Meteorologist Ian Leonard also learned (by his own admission) just how comfortable his office chair is after not moving from it for several hours, and veteran anchor Ron Steele literally threw himself right into the storm, filing live reports from the midst of hailstorms and spinning clouds before making it to the Waterloo studios. Both stations also cancelled countless commercial breaks, taking a hit on ad dollars to stay with the story.

On the radio side, unlike the case in Minot, the designated emergency broadcast stations in the area did their duty with announcers breaking in with timely announcements and updates. But, consolidation has left many commercial stations in the area without a sufficient news staff to provide ongoing coverage

Radio could do better. In a 2003 national survey, 84 percent of respondents said radio would be very important in “the event of a terrorism attack, mass power outage, inclement weather or other catastrophe.” That makes sense — radio is portable, and can run on batteries (some even operate without batteries on a wind-up spring).

Yet, when it came to the point where my family and I huddled in the basement during a tornado warning, we couldn’t find continuous radio coverage of the storm and instead did what the TV weatherman suggested: turn up the TV very loud so you can hear it from the “safe” room. And there we were, in the basement, listening to the muffled but audible TV sound that made its way through the floorboards. Thank goodness the power didn’t go out, because I’m not sure where I would turn to on the radio.