Did The Media Neglect The Texas Fertilizer Plant Explosion?

Last week, the Boston Marathon bombings dominated news. From the explosions on the finish line on Patriots Day through Friday’s dramatic manhunt, it was the biggest news event of the week. But it wasn’t the most deadly one.

While four people died as the result of the Tsarnaev brothers’ terrorist rampage (three victims from the bombings as well as MIT police officer Sean Collier who was murdered in cold blood on Thursday night), the explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas last week killed 14, many of whom were first responders.

But not only did West, Texas receive less coverage, there was also less media outrage focused on the explosion. While countless ink has spilled wondering whose intelligence failure led to the Tsarnaev brothers going undetected by U.S. intelligence agencies, there has been far less focus on the Texas explosion so big that it registered on seismometers. As Mike Elk rages in the Washington Post:

The plant had 1,350 times the legally allowed amount of highly explosive ammonium nitrate, yet hadn’t informed the Department of Homeland Security of the danger. Likewise, the fertilizer plant did not have sprinklers, shut-off valves, fire alarms or legally required blast walls, all of which could have prevented the catastrophic damage done. And there was little chance that regulators would learn about the problems without the company reporting them: Not only had the Occupational Safety and Health Administration not inspected the plant since 1985 but also, because of underfunding, OSHA can inspect plants like the one in West on average only once every 129 years.

Elk goes on to express his outrage that the media have totally neglected this story:

The coverage so far of the Texas disaster is a far cry from the gold bar of workplace safety reporting, set by Walter Cronkite in 1968 following the Farmington, W.Va., mine explosion, in which 78 miners were killed. Then, Cronkite camped out for four days in a field in the middle of winter and provided in-depth stories on the mine explosion and its aftermath. Cronkite’s impassioned journalism is widely credited by workplace safety advocates as inspiring the passage of the first federal mine safety legislation: the 1969 Coal Mine Health and Safety Act. Since the legislation was enacted, the number of coal mining accidents have plummeted from 311 in 1968 to just 19 in 2012.

Over the years, though, the media have not kept up Cronkite’s dogged reporting on workplace safety — or on workers at all. This decline in coverage has created an environment in which companies may feel as if they can get away with massive safety violations because they will face little scrutiny from the media and the public. For instance, in 2010, an explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia killed 29 miners. In the year leading up to the explosion, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the mine was cited 458 times for safety violations, with 50 of those violations being “for willful or gross negligence”— a rate nearly five times the national average for a single mine. But after the disaster, this information and the story of the mine disaster vanished from the national discourse, and new mine safety legislationfailed to pass even a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.

While Elk has valid points, he seems to underestimate how important that the Boston attacks were—after all they have resulted in fewer fatalities but newsworthiness is not directly correlated with death toll. The Texas explosions were under covered in part because of the breaking news in Boston. A number of network anchors like Matt Lauer and Anderson Cooper had flown to West, Texas to cover the story and then were forced to double back to Massachusetts in the wake of the firefight in Watertown, Massachusetts on Thursday night.

There also is the caveat that rarely do most industrial disasters make good television. The explosion in West, Texas made great television as a giant fireball erupted in the Texas evening sky. The coverage Elk desired likely would have happened—if not for the horrific terrorist attacks in Boston. The media did miss the story in Texas and can still do much in the future. But, in this case, the press can’t be blamed.

Share this article