These things are such
one-off's and are just blips compared to the kinds of jobs most structural engineers are doing day-to-day. To get a structural engineer interested, you'd have to
throw a lot of money at them. If it got to that extreme, it'd probably be cheaper to tour with an engineer than to hire a new one in every city. Even then, that only reduces the risk of failures after the structure is erected and still leaves some amount of risk in the process of erecting the structure.
As for news, this is a small industry. While I think there is more awareness in the media than there has been, plenty of accidents that are only covered by local news show up on these forums. It's a small enough industry that there's a chance with every incident that someone here at CB personally knows the people involved with the accident, even those reported only by local news.
The
line that we use a lot here in the office is, "Same faces, different companies," because despite people moving between different companies over the years, the various players in our industry remain the same.
Regardless of how often these accidents happen versus how often they make national headlines, it doesn't change the fact that we're such a small industry that one person's death or injury can make regional or even national waves.
Just because the national media does or doesn't bite on a story doesn't mean it isn't worth discussing here on CB or putting under the scrutiny of our peers. That said, it's worth noting that there probably has not been a recent influx of these accidents, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't think they were showing up on CB a lot more than they used to...