Untold story

Interestingly enough, I stumbled upon this story when I was combing through the Star Telegram archives online. There was a story that talked about how the rate of Latino workers had increased in Texas but the general number of deaths had decreased. Within the article they identified with a recent death, Cornelio Salvador Moreno, who was killed this month when the tunnel he was in collapsed. What caught my attention though was there were no specific date; just his name, age, ethnic identification and the company he had worked for. http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_action=doc&p_docid=118BCE94A8C2A1A0&p_docnum=7
I was curious and decided to go to the online to a Houston local paper and see if I could find out anymore information. Here is where I became even more confused because the article I found was short and choppy with just the bare essentials and a comment or two from Sgt. J. Trump who was searching for the missing drowned man and a relative, Sonia Rodriguez. There was no comment from the North Harris County Regional Water Authority. http://www.click2houston.com/newsarchive/11517544/detail.html I went to their main site as well and combed their website looking for an article about the man’s death, or an action report and found nothing. I even typed his full name into the search box, but again came up empty handed, their website is out of date with the archives going back only to October 2003 with the most recent news pertaining about Pricing policy guidelines, the rising cost of water and pump free; but even those were dated all the way back to 11-15-2006.
Surprisingly the news coverage vs. the organizational response was far and few. There were 3 almost near consecutive articles talking about the missing and drowned man, and then a final article when he was found. During all these articles however, there was no comment from the organization. The words the media used to describe this accident were very informal; death, drowned, body, died. Through each article there was heavy repetition and a tonal of clipped finality. The articles were short and bare, almost as if they didn’t really want to dwell on the matter. http://www.click2houston.com/news/11512699/detail.html Even though I am unable to answer all the questions due to the fact I couldn’t find a response from North Harris County Regional Water Authority, I still used this as my article because I consider this a major flaw: a great example of how the media could take this story and run with it because the organization didn’t respond. In the Startelegram, Cornelio was specifically mentioned as one of the many Latino’s who has died this year. From the lack of response of the organization it can easily be concluded, though may not be true that it looks like the organization doesn’t care about its workers; especially Latinos. In the article it specifically mentioned that he was of Mexican heritage and it had been his first day on the job. Professor Lambiase pointed out an incident at one of her places of business how a person drowned, a civilian and all the things she did; press release and media coverage, condolence etc. to patch up that crisis. It looks like this company did nothing, the only source about this whole incident was from the newspaper articles and even at the very end they finally tacked on who the crew was working for. Since there is no organizational response or one that I could find, many false conclusions could be drawn by the public and do damage to the North Harris County Regional Water Authority and there are still many gaps to be filled: How did this happen? What are they doing to prevent it from happening again? Have they stopped work for now or have continued?