Worth reading all of this.

From:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/...ll-disaster.ars

On the night of January 18, 2002, 911 operators serving Ward County, North Dakota began receiving panicked phone calls from the residents of Minot, the state's fourth largest city. "I don't know what it is but there was a huge, huge crash," one caller explained. "There's smoke everywhere outside."

"You need to stay calm until we can figure out what, what's going on," an operator told a resident. "You need to stay in your house."

But it was already too late for that.

"Female: My daughter ran out the front door.
Operator: She ran out? How old is your daughter?
Female: She's twelve . . . Is she going to die out there?
Male: I don't know.
Female: You guys have to hurry please."

What neither emergency dispatch or Minot's residents knew yet was that a railway train transporting anhydrous ammonia for fertilizer had just derailed nearby. It exploded and dumped almost 250,000 gallons of the compound near one of the town's residential neighborhoods. With electricity down, residents who smelled fumes frantically tuned their battery operated radios to KCJB AM 910, the designated local emergency broadcast station, for news.

But to no avail.

"KCJB, and every other radio station in town, were not reporting any news or information about the anhydrous spill," explains New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg in his gripping book Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media. "Instead, all six of Minot's name-brand stations—Z94, 97 Kicks, Mix 99.9, The Fox Classic Rock, 91 Country, and Cars Oldies Radio—continued playing a standard menu of canned music, served up by smooth-talking DJs trading in light banter and off-color jokes while the giant toxic cloud floated into town."

All of those licenses were owned by Clear Channel Communications, Klinenberg notes, which, upon purchasing the signals in 2000, "replaced locally produced news, music, and talk programs with prepackaged content engineered in remote studios and transmitted to North Dakota through digital voice-tracking systems."