#bozeplod, six months on

On March 5, a natural gas explosion in downtown Bozeman killed one woman and destroyed several buildings.

That morning, local Twitter users went crazy online, sharing minute-by-minute updates from downtown and everywhere else. The hashtag I created a few minutes after the blast -- #bozexplod -- became a trending topic on Twitter for a good portion of the day.

A lot of local entrepreneurs and Web hipsters tried to make something of the nascent online "community" that formed that day, and I even wrote a couple of blog posts extolling the virtues of Twitter as a source of news in a crisis.

In the months since, the explosion site has been cleaned up and readied for new construction, and the Twitter fervor in Bozeman has died down somewhat -- replaced by an out-and-out fiasco involving the city's social networking screening of job applicants.

The online community that so many wanted to make so much of back in March has proven fleeting. It was a quirk of time and space that made Twitter work so well that day. As it turned out, Twitter wasn't as big a deal to Bozeman as we all thought while the fires were still burning.

(Oh, and my fascination with Twitter has waned considerably since. That's something I should probably write more about at some point.)

The point of mentioning all this is because there's been some news about the explosion. Northwestern Energy has announced the results of an internal investigation into the explosion. The company's investigators have determined that the company was not negligent -- their evidence suggests that "external forces" caused the gas leak that led to the explosion.

This is not the end of it. Lots of other agencies are still investigating on their own, and many insurance claims are still outstanding, much to the ire of downtown business owners affected by the explosion.

At any rate, I thought the news merited a brief look back at March and the Twitter orgy.

Related posts:

1. Social media as journalism in a small city
2. The Power of Social Media Comes Full Circle in Montana
3. What Twitter did for crisis journalism today
4. Twitter Updates for 2009-09-25
5. Web content generated from the Bozeman explosion today