I grew up in Vernon, moved away after high school in 2009 and attended college, served in the Army and attended grad school. I returned this May and have been an avid reader of the Advertiser-News North since then.
I appreciate that there is a paper serving the community where I grew up, but I have some serious concerns from time to time about the coverage.
This afternoon I was reading the Oct 19-25 edition of the Advertiser-News North. I was struck by a line in the article titled “40 Years Since Their Ultimate Sacrifice.” The line reads, “This was the largest non-nuclear explosion in history” (referring to the device used in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut).
I am fairly well-read on the history of U.S. interventions in the Middle East and fairly familiar with improvised explosives, and this statement struck me as very unlikely, so I tried to verify the information by googling “largest non-nuclear explosion in history.”
The very first return is a paper published on the NIH.gov website that calls the 2020 explosion at a fertilizer storage facility in Beirut the largest non-nuclear explosion in history, not the 1983 barracks bombing. Links two and three on the search return page are papers from Oxford University and another U.S. government website, respectively, which also confirm that the 2020 explosion was the largest non-nuclear blast in history.
These two events occurred 37 years apart under drastically different conditions, and your coverage certainly has people in Sussex County conflating them.
Perhaps this is no big deal. Both explosions were large and tragic, and Americans envisioning a terrorist attack as utilizing a larger device than it actually did is probably not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
However, the only paper serving our small community being unwilling to perform a fact check on something that is so obviously off and so simple to confirm or deny is egregious and a great disservice to the people of Sussex County.
Chaz Smigen
Vernon