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."

The media giant has been trying to discredit Klinenberg's account ever since. The company even calls his and similar versions "The Minot Myth."

"As always, the Myth begins with the same incorrect fact: KCJB(AM) was unmanned the night of the disaster," Clear Channel wrote to the Federal Communications Commission on May 6, in response to Klinenberg's testimony at a recent FCC hearing. "This leads to a faulty assumption: Unattended operation delayed the broadcast of emergency information. And then an unsupported conclusion: Corporate consolidation led to the unattended operation of the station and the resulting delay in information dissemination."

The Minot railway crash of 2002 killed one resident and forced many others to evacuate their homes for six weeks. More than 1,000 people required medical care. But while the incident is largely forgotten beyond the borders of that region, its memory will inform media policy for years to come.

Ironically, Clear Channel's framing of the debate is exactly right. Has consolidation in radio, with its emphasis on centralized remote digital studios rather than live local staffers, weakened our nation's emergency response system? Are we less safe now because of what has happened to broadcast radio over the last 15 years? And has the proliferation of broadband devices since then really made us any more secure?

Let's follow Klinenberg's version of the accident, then consider Clear Channel's reply.

It was awful

Fighting for Air's account of that desperate night never says that KCJB was "unmanned" during the crisis, but the book chronicles a series of failures to access Clear Channel's stations to get out the emergency word.

According to Klinenberg, Minot dispatchers attempted to activate the government's Emergency Alert System, which should have allowed them to take over KCJB's broadcast and tell residents how to respond to the crisis. But a Minot police official found "the EAS programming would dump every time we got a power surge. So it didn't operate." Next authorities tried to patch in the older Emergency Broadcasting System, designed during the Cold War era, but that failed as well.

So the cops went for their next option—calling the station. "Local authorities knew that KCJB was running with automated technology," Fighting for Air explains, "yet they hoped that someone would be working the late shift." But no one answered the phone. "We rang it and we rang it and we rang it and he never answered," a lieutenant explained. "We're telling people to tune in to the radio, and they're just getting music. It was awful."

Klinenberg's narrative notes that Clear Channel subsequently insisted that somebody at its central Minot offices was "attempting to learn what was happening." The National Transportation and Safety Board's Railroad Accident Report on the disaster says that at the time of the crisis, "only one person was working at the designated local emergency broadcast radio station (KCJB-AM), and the police department’s calls to the station went unanswered." The local TV signal was off the air.

Finally, the police tracked down KCJB broadcaster Don May, a 40-year employee of the frequency. May got in his car and drove through the toxic plume in the dead of night. "When I got [to KCJB] all of our telephone lines and all of the lines at the police department were jammed," he told Klinenberg. "The fellow who was there that night had no idea what was transpiring. He couldn't call out because every time he picked up the phone there was someone on the line."

About two hours after the derailment and spill, May went on the air to make an announcement, but "there was no way for him to update his information."

These explanations do not properly answer "the only question that matters for the people of Minot," Klinenberg concludes. If there was indeed someone at Clear Channel's Minot HQ at the moment of the ammonia spill, and calls were rapidly coming into the station with news, "why didn't that person go on the air and issue an alert?"

Regardless

Clear Channel, in contrast, blames Minot officials for the breakdown in communications. "The failure of specific local law enforcement officials to accept responsibility for the situation that ensued has prevented the situation from being corrected," the company's website insists to this day.

"Regardless of what you've heard or read, the truth of the matter is that local law enforcement were unable to execute EAS procedures that night—they did not and could not automatically interrupt our local broadcast—as the National Weather Service has done without incident before that day and since—because, tragically local law enforcement had not installed their equipment."

In the media outfit's version sent to the FCC in early May, the police department had not added a proper encoder link to the "EAS system and a radio receiver they had provided to the station long ago." In addition, authorities transmitted their emergency alert message to the wrong frequency.

Nonetheless, through the emergency, KCJB staff "attempted to alert the public about the disaster as best it could," Clear Channel says:

"That night, Gerald 'Jerry' Michels, an eighteen year broadcasting veteran, worked the overnight shift at KCJB(AM). Immediately after the derailment, the station began receiving a flood of telephone calls. Michels awaited official information via an EAS message without which he did not know exactly what had happened. In the absence of official news, he had no information to provide the stations' listeners. He contacted the station's Operations Director, Allison Bostow and its News Director, Don May to alert them to the situation. Ms. Bostow, (whose concern for the community compelled her to continue working from her basement despite being within the area affected by the toxic cloud), and Mr. May, tried calling their police contacts, but police phone lines were jammed with callers. Finally, Lt. Kurt Smith, the Minot Police Department's overnight shift commander, and May reached each other. By this time, additional Clear Channel personnel (from sales people to on-air staff) had left the safety of their homes and joined Michels at the studio to help provide on-air information and answer the flood of incoming telephone calls to all of the Clear Channel stations in Minot, including KCJB(AM)."

After the accident, Clear Channel worked with local authorities to get EAS equipment operational. "The staff of KCJB(AM) should be applauded for their efforts in the early hours of January 18, 2002," Clear Channel's statement to the FCC concludes. "KCJB(AM) was still the first radio station to alert the citizens of Minot to the derailment, and the dangers it posed. If disaster again strikes the area, the KCJB(AM) studio will be staffed-no matter what time or what day-as it was in the early morning of January 18, 2002."

More questions

We wish that Clear Channel's answers to Klinenberg's history sewed this issue up. But they don't, at least not for us.

For example: why, if KCJB was indeed Minot's designated emergency radio station, didn't Clear Channel and the police department staff regularly test their EAS connection to make sure that it was functional? Why didn't the police and KCJB share a dedicated phone or mobile line, so as to avoid a busy signal? And why was Minot's Christian community station, which Klinenberg reports called the police for information, not required to carry EAS gear as well? What good is the "community" classification if these licenses don't take those responsibilities on?

Most important, if Clear Channel had not owned all of Minot's five commercial stations—if they each had been locally owned and operated—wouldn't it have been as much as five times more likely that first responders would have been able to reach one of them, connect to an on-air talk system, and tell the public what to do next?

Clear Channel isn't the media behemoth it was in 2002, when it owned well over 1,000 radio licenses, thanks to the relaxation of the FCC's broadcast ownership rules. Since then the company has sold quite a few of them. And in its bid to go private, the media giant may have over borrowed to the point of collapse.

But that's not really the issue at hand. Here at the San Francisco chapter of the Ars Orbiting HQ, we're waiting for our next major earthquake. On that fateful day, our Internet won't be worth much if our local ISPs go down. Our smartphones won't help if carrier networks overload or their transmitter towers run out of back-up power. Ditto for cable TV, electricity-wise.

So chances are that when the Big One comes, we'll drop our fancy mobiles, get in our cars, and fire up our AM radios. Here's hoping that six months later we won't be following debates about why we heard nothing but Rush Limbaugh and adult contemporary pop.