Propane and lawsuits

I was just listening to Prof. Garry Watson on CBC Radio very gently trying to explain that it might be a bit early to start talking about how class action lawsuits would proceed relating to the recent Toronto propane explosion.
The whole situation, obviously, is bad. It's tragic for the employee who was (apparently) killed in the explosion, and for the Toronto firefighter who died at the scene, albeit (apparently) of natural causes.
Isn't it amazing it wasn't worse? No other fatalities, no serious injuries, and what would appear to be full coverage by insurance with no resulting rate changes. And we don't yet know and may never know what exactly was the cause.
By the way, it turns out that there might be, oh, 337 propane facilities in the City of Toronto alone. Which arises from our demand for convenience of service - like nineteenth-century railroads, or natural gas piped to our houses, or power generating stations that nobody wants located close to their homes.
On the radio, the gentleman who is gathering signatures for the proposed class action suit said that "it was up to the lawyers" when asked who the defendants were going to be. That kind of sums it up, doesn't it? Since this must be someone's fault, a lawsuit is the obvious way to go, and questions of cause, who might be at fault for that cause, or whether there are in fact any uncompensated damages go by the boards.
The news cycle now is such that this aspect must get thrown in the hopper. It's long been the case that the litigation outlasts the attention to the thing that prompted it - but now I bet that the media will be done with this story before there's even any kind of report that should prompt someone to start thinking about a lawsuit.
Why do we want to rely on private legal remedies when (fairly obviously) the problem, if there is one, is public regulation or the lack of it? For convenience reasons, we ignore both the way facilities like this insinuate themselves everywhere and how (or if) they're regulated and inspected - until something like this happens and the handwringing commences.