How does a big, local story play out in the age of Twitter?

In the case of the explosion at the Kleen Energy gas plant in Middletown yesterday, it meant wildly varying estimates of the damage, injuries and loss of life.

Reports on local TV, on TV and newspaper Web sites and on Twitter initially quoted public safety representatives as saying that the explosion was a "mass casualty" incident.

At one point, it was said that 300 people were working in the building, then 100, then 50.

Estimates of the number of people injured were pegged at 100 for a good part of the afternoon, then grew to 250, before being narrowed down to "less than 50."

The latest figures show that 5 people died in the explosion, and about a dozen were injured.

A very grave aspect of the lack of good information about the incident as it unfolded yesterday, which wasn't immediately clear to media outlets, was that public safety officials were searching for victims in the rubble of the building, didn't have a good estimate, apparently, on how many people were at the site at the time, and really didn't know what they were dealing with.

As late as this morning, the Middletown deputy fire marshal said that officials still can't guarantee that everyone is accounted for, and that they have been unable to search a portion of the building that is still too structurally unstable to risk rescue workers going into.