From the Valdez Star, 10/17/2007
Thought this might be of interest.
Bomb scare was a school project
Suspicious package was a geocacheBy Lee Revis
Editor, Valdez Star
What began as an innocent school activity for Gilson Junior High School students turned into a major public spectacle last Wednesday after a suspicious package was reported underneath the fuel tanks behind the building housing the swimming pool at Valdez High School.
Both the junior and senior high schools were evacuated at 2:15 and traffic on Robe River Drive was brought to a standstill after police and fire personnel responded to the scene of the suspicious package – described as a small box wrapped in duct tape.
“Everything was super-dooper serious,” said Lance Bowie, superintendent for Valdez City Schools. Earlier in the day, a school shooting in Cleveland, Ohio was making headlines on TV news across the country and an Anchorage middle school experienced a gun scare.
“We were real cautious cause we gotta be,” said Bowie.
The box turned out to be part of a geocache – a popular school sanctioned activity at the junior high. To the initiated, geocaching is probably best described as a modern version of a scavenger hunt or a game of hide and seek. Items are hidden in a given area – in this case the junior high and high schools – and students use Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to find the items using location coordinates they are given. It’s a fun way to teach students many different skills.
The GPS units have been in use at Gilson since they were donated to the school for student use last year.
In this case, the geocache was mistaken for a potential threat to the school and the bomb squad inside the Valdez Police Department was called in and emergency measures to protect students and staff was activated.
It was just “everybody out now,” said Bowie, “They (students and staff from both schools) were moved quickly and efficiently.”
Ironically, Gilson students had practiced a full school evacuation to the Teen Center on the corner of Hanagita and Hazelet Streets only two days before, and the entire student body of both schools were said to have been evacuated within minutes. High school students were sent to the T-ball field across the street.
“I called transportation services,” said Bowie, “I said ‘let them roll.’”
After students and staff were sent to safety, the bomb squad x-rayed the package, revealing a bottle and a few other innocuous items, which police eventually exploded behind the school.
The contents were later revealed as a bottle of Propel fitness water and some band-aids.
“Police officers look at things differently than the rest of us,” said Bowie, chuckling about the whole affair.
While all’s well that ends well, Bowie says the school is putting new rules into place so that the same mistake won’t happen again and students and emergency responders alike got real time hands on practice in responding to an emergency.
If the threat had been real, “then we’d been heroes,” said Bowie.
www.valdezstar.net/03082006story_one.html