Give all BBC staff camera phones
Posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 11:58pm. #
The story of the Virgin Trains Cumbria train crash this evening is being covered on both national news channels with non-stop coverage; BBC News 24 stopping their normal simulcast of the ‘Ten’ to continue bringing this breaking news.
What’s interesting is that the BBC has a considerable amount of photographs; including the one I’ve nicked above. Sky News has no photographs. On listening to the coverage, it emerges that the photographs are from a BBC employee.
The BBC has 27,150 employees. Many of those employees are very loyal and willing to help the organisation they work for in any way. One wonders whether, if the BBC was to offer to purchase every employee a higher-quality camera-phone (and a bounty for each photo used), whether that would result in 27,150 ‘photo-journalists’, and thus an unbeatable news capture system.
The BBC is also, cleverly, linking to a journalist in-vision at BBC Radio Cumbria – miles away from the action, but it does break up the one bloke in the studio; and again, something Sky can’t do. It turns out that the journalist’s sister was travelling on the train: again, one benefit of being a large organisation.
commentator
Martin
Only at 23:36 on the bbc coverage did they say that overhead powerlines were no turned off. The ambulance spokesman confirmed that prior to this no attempt had been made to enter or rescue anyone in eight of the nine carriages because the rescue crews would be endangered by the powerlines.
Just announced live at 23:43 that power was “switched off one and a half hours ago”, and that there are still people who have not been reached.
Frankly, I have seen this incompetence from rescuers before. They hang back waiting until perfect safety for themselves, whilst injured people stumble or drag themselves out past that same danger.
We need to know exactly the time lapse between the accident and the power switch-off. If it is more than 10 mins, it is in my opinion criminal incompetence.
The ambulance spokesman clearly described live powerlines draped across derailed carriages, and rescue crews therefore declining to enter.
Confirmed again at 23:48 – only one carriage accessed so far – reconfirmed powerlines were draped, and crews refused to advance. Some indication that they thought they were live for longer than they were.
Why do the news sources not home in on such a crucial issue. Similar situations were reported in one of the London tube accidents recently. Rescuers refusing to move forward for hours whilst close to casualties.