Probably because it happened to a village of 200 people in the relative middle of nowhere.
Remember the Flint water crisis? That was a population-dense city, with multiple school districts all being poisoned by lead and legionnaires disease. Nobody cared about it until it was turned into a political negligence story, then it was all you could see on Fox and CNN...
People just don't really care about this stuff. It's novel from a social media perspective (black plume of smoke occludes forested midwestern town!) but it's not like the media has any shortage of humanitarian crises to report on.
And Flint's water empties into all 5 lakes. Still not worth talking about polluting the world's largest freshwater body until we can throw darts at a talking head though!
No, I disagree. Flint was a disaster because it went for years without being addressed - if this has a cleanup process starting less than a week after it happens, it's already being handled better.
