I heard it on the radio yesterday while reloading ammo. It’s on the web now:
Idaho 55 at the Rainbow Bridge was closed for about six hours Tuesday after a suspicious object was found underneath the bridge.
An ITD spokesman said investigators were conducting a routine bridge safety inspection around 9:30 a.m. today when they saw an object they could not identify. It was a green bucket with wires poking out.
Idaho State Police and the Boise Bomb Squad were called in to investigate and 17 miles of highway was closed. Investigators determined the bucket was filled with trinkets, photos and toys placed there as part of an online scavenger hunt called geocache. Players use a global positioning system to find the treasure.
Police say the man who stashed the object under the bridge has come forward and charges might be filed against him.
As it was said in a geocaching forum:
Consider. If all it takes to shut down the country is to toss ducted tape tupperware full of rocks with an old radio in it out the side of your window while you are driving down the interstate, then it won’t be long before terrorists start causing disruption in a mass scale by doing exactly that.
There are an almost infinite number of things we can’t and shouldn’t defend against. Money is better spend attacking the root of the problem–extremist Muslims. We must destroy their culture.
Actually, I’ve been surprised that they don’t adopt techniques like that. In my last quarter at college we had to move the finals to the local mall because we were getting bomb threats called in every other day. It totally disrupted the school with very little effort on the part of the ‘attacker’.
On the Washington State University campus a few years ago, someone noticed that a large envelope placed in a mail box had no return address. Because of that, a bomb squad was brought in to deal with this “suspicious package”. Lets all go insane together and call it a party!
Now I wonder if anyone had the thought of taking the GPS coordinates of the package of toys under the bridge, and Googling for it. Might that not reveal its status as a geocached object? Even then, would that have changed their attitude toward it? They still could get themselves into a big media story, show themselves as relevant, and cover their butts at the same time– win win win.
Lyle,
I’m am avid geocacher myself (heck, my wedding last weekend was listed as a geocaching event!). Even if someone HAD thought to search the main geocaching website (www.geocaching.com), they would not have come up with anything. There has never been a listing there for a geocache at that location, not now, not in the past, and not even one that was submitted to the site and denied. That sort of cache location would not be listed under our guidelines ( http://www.geocaching.com/about/guidelines.aspx ), for the very reason that so many people these days over-react to anything they don’t understand.
While I totally agree with Joe (as usual!) that we should attack the real problem rather then live in fear of buckets under bridges, geocaching.com generally tries to discourage cache placements that scare the sheep (like under highway bridges). There are a few rogue geocaching sites, generally used by people who don’t like to follow the rules. Perhaps it was listed on one of them, but since the most popular alternative cache listing sites is invite only, google wouldn’t help.
Chris