Exactly. This is what, the third oil facility fire within the past week? I doubt coincidence.
MM
Some poor father is trying desperately to find his missing daughter from the nightclub fire last night. He found one daughter and the missing daughter's boyfriend, but the last time anyone saw his missing daughter was inside the building. He's running around absolutely distraught. And the idiot reporter starts telling him that the protechtics seem to be responsible and asks him how he feels about that. Somebody should have slugged her for him.
This is the third oil facility fire POSTED ON FR in BREAKING news within the past week...an important distiniction. People are LOOKING for these and posting them in breaking news.
The fire in this particular thread is small enough that I doubt that in August, 2001, anyone would have posted AT ALL on FR about it, and it certainly wouldn't have been BREAKING. If it was posted, probably would have gotten probably 5-10 replies at most for the next 24 hours, mostly from people living nearby.
The "Attention Effect" strikes again.
Trust me, this is ABSOLUTELY identical to what happened in January 2000 on Y2K boards like Timebomb 2000. The Y2K nutters were bitterly disappointed that the world didn't end at midnight January 1. But they quickly latched on to a gradual collapse of infrastructure "snowballing." So they happily spent a month or two searching for and collecting and posting every refinery or fuel fire, power outage, industrial accident, in the world. And they discovered there were a LOT of them. And they all convinced themselves they were right about Y2K.