short stories / By Heidi Walters

Bomb Threat

(Oct. 2, 2008)  Once again — what, the last time was just in May? — a bomb threat had Humboldt State University all bound up and tense last week as men and women huddled in bright vests near the danger zone and others — campus security and campus housing staff hastily stuffed into yet more bright vests — re-routed passersby.

This time the scene of the suspected bomb was in the library parking lot, where around half past 4 p.m. last Tuesday, Sept. 23, somebody had found something in front of the parked cars that looked awfully like a pipe bomb and called the campus police to report it, said HSU P.R. guy Frank Whitlatch. Whitlatch was at the scene, dealing with the small pack of reporters who had either heard of the threat on the scanner or happened to pass by L.K. Wood and saw it clogged by fire engines and police cars, with ambulances arriving all-a-siren.

GALLERY >

By 6 p.m., a suited-up guy had taken a gander at the thing. Not long after, the Incident Commander, HSU Police Chief Tom Dewey, announce loudly to onlookers and emergency personnel: “There may be a small banging noise.”

Another official yelled: “Fire in the hole!”

And then there was a small banging noise, followed by the wan honking of a car alarm. Child’s play.

Or was it? Whitlatch said the team from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s bomb squad had just fired a “small, disintegrating projectile” at the suspected pipe bomb, and he’d maybe know within a half-hour or so what the verdict was: a fake, or the real deal?

So people waited, and watched. Mostly, they were people whose cars were parked where the device was found. One of them, John Moor, who teaches at Alice Birney Elementary School in Eureka, had just gotten out of a meeting on campus of the Elementary Education Partnership Council. He’d parked in the lot at 4, gone to the meeting, and when he got out the lot was taped off.

“It’s just an annoyance,” he said. “Whoever did it, whatever they were trying to accomplish, it’s just been an inconvenience for us. I don’t see a lot of people scared, so, if that’s what they were trying to accomplish, it didn’t work.”

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