Here’s a story, Air Support, from the NYT about the importance of 24-hour local radio is to emergency communications.
In the early morning of Jan. 18, 2002, a Canadian Pacific Railway train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed just outside Minot, N.D., spilling roughly 240,000 gallons of anhydrous ammonia into a woodsy neighborhood on the outskirts of town. The resulting toxic cloud grew to some five miles long, two and a half miles wide and 350 feet high, enveloping the homes of approximately 15,000 people. Confused and afraid, thousands of Minot residents turned on their radios to get public warnings and instructions on how to stay safe.
Photograph by Dan Winters
Yet no such information was available. Minot’s six nonreligious commercial stations, all of which were owned and operated by the nation’s largest radio company, Clear Channel Communications, were broadcasting prerecorded programs engineered in remote studios. Police dispatchers couldn’t reach anyone in Clear Channel’s local offices: the town’s new emergency-communications system failed to automatically issue an alert, and no one answered the phones at the stations. What ensued was horrific: as one man died and hundreds became ill from inhaling the poisonous gas, the airwaves were filled with canned music and smooth-talking D.J.’s.
Five years later, America’s emergency-communications system remains woefully inadequate. Consider, for instance, the basic question of where you would turn for information if disaster struck your hometown. The Internet puts up-to-the-minute information at your fingertips, but not if you can’t turn on your computer or your local network is down. Mobile phones allow for voice conversations and text messaging, but not when the system is jammed from overuse. Cable television offers hundreds of channels, but not one of them works when the power is out. Radio, when accessed by battery-powered receivers, provides the optimum combination of reliability and accessibility — but not if local stations have no one in the studios to report the news.
