I raised it on a subscription radio site and the Clear Channel minions literally came out of the woodwork trying to blame the police.

Anyone who believes that media consolidation, whether it be terrestrial radio or consolidation of the satellite radio duopoly that already restricts competition to one, should know the details of this story.

There's an article in Harpers that's great. And the Wikipedia piece on the Minot Train Derailment is pretty good too, even though Wikipedia is awful on radio subjects (a consequence when a group of people who know nothing about a subject edit people who do.)

This was a kind of an aberration because Minot wound up under the complete stranglehold of Clear Channel because CC was the amalgam of several other superchains that all had Minot stations, and it later had to divest some of them. But not before they were caught sleeping at the switch.

The biggest problem with Minot, at least to me, is that CC claims there really was somebody in the 6 radio stations that were all importing programming at that hour, but they've never identified that person. No one with the ability to compel an answer to that question appears to have ever asked in a demanding way.

CC claims the police didn't install the equipment necessary to attract their attention. I say that a company that owns nearly all the stations in the market should have enough people on the ground to pick up the fact there was a major disaster on its own. Answering the phone would be a good way. Having a journalist on staff who gave a damn would be another.