Plane crashes are big news, train crashes – not so much

 The Asiana Airlines plane crash in San Francisco has received wall-to-wall coverage on cable TV news channels – even knocking the George Zimmerman murder trial to a second-tier location – while the train derailment near the Maine border has been nearly blacked out from the airwaves.

Does that make any sense? Is that good journalism?

The plane crash caused two deaths, possibly just one now that it appears one victim was killed after being hit by a fire rescue vehicle on the runway.

The train derailment in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, killed at least 13 people and 50 more are still missing, as it took firefighters two days to extinguish all the flames. The explosion leveled the heart of the town, 30 buildings, and forced the evacuation of 1,000 people.

Yet, the airline crash is front page news and the train tragedy is relegated to the back pages.

The larger story behind the Asiana tragedy is that air travel has become extraordinarily safe and today’s planes and equipment, particularly the Boeing 777 that was involved in this crash, have a spectacularly successful track record. This was America’s first fatal commercial flight in 14 years. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that basic human error, on the part of one or both Korean pilots, was the cause of this weekend’s accident.

The larger story behind the explosion of the runaway train in Quebec is that these types of “oil trains” are becoming more and more common as rail transport surpasses pipelines as the shipping means of choice.

In fact, since 2009 the number of train cars carrying crude oil hauled by major railroads has jumped nearly 20-fold, to an estimated 200,000 last year, according to news reports.

These trains travel through towns all across America, in many cases carrying crude pumped from the massive Bakken oil reserves in North Dakota and Montana to refineries far and wide.

Safety experts say oil spills from trains are more frequent than from pipelines, though they tend to be smaller.

In the border town of Lac-Megantic, stunned and angry residents are still wondering how a train carrying 72 tanker cars filled with crude oil became a runaway fireball on rails speeding toward their town. Early indications are that safety regulations failed in this case, leading to the massive derailment that exploded five tanker cars.

The Associated Press talked with Frank LaFontaine, who said he believes he lost three family members in the train crash, including his son.

“We always wait until there’s a big accident to change things,” he said. “Well, today we’ve had a big accident, it’s one of the biggest ever in Canada.”

We wait until it’s too late.

And, in the media, we move on much too soon to the next story.