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Frangible: Have a heart for the moderators on this one
. I happened to be watching the news when it first happened and your suggestion of deleting a goodly proportion of the first few pages indeed happened. You can see from the first post when the news first hit the international headlines. Well I can tell you that in the first hour after that I saw Duck Rogers had very concisely and properly cut at least three pages down to two, despite it growing like
Topsy with some chaoticly conflicting reports from very respected news agencies like Reuters, and attempts by some to follow every turn in the numbers (I reported one reversal myself so as not to raise false hopes too long when some said 2, some said none, some said 7 fatalities). But no-one in the first hour or two of tv reporting could have foreseen the scale of the disaster from the limited video available except dear old Chris Yates actually, who was rather put on the spot albeit being paid for it you might argue, and actually cautioned gently that it looked serious when he first saw the smoking aftermath in that long range El Mundo video). He did allow himself to hope on hope as we all did for a period after that when Reuters and one other had 'confirmed' no fatalities, but he is only human.
We might not enjoy his
ums and ers but he was trying his best to be sensitive first and foremost to the needs of worried friends and relatives I think as the scant news hit the airwaves. And actually that was the priority and remains the priority, as SAS's CEO went to pains to say this morning.
Sadly, despite a brief twenty minutes or so yesterday of 100% false hope, this was not a BA038 '
alls well that ends well on the day'. That's why it feels much different I guess just 24 hours in.
I think the mods have worked their socks off. From what I have seen, they were extremely quickly on to it like the PPRuNe emergency it was. They know that PPRuNe on such a day acts as a kind of repository for all the news as it breaks, and as such I think they have edited it admirably in the first cuts, and no doubt once they catch their breath, it will continue into the weeks ahead in some further tidied guise as a thread which commands the gravity it and this website deserve on all the major issues...