The local TV stations and Palm Beach Post rag didn't have a single thing to say about the bomb scare that took place a few days about a mile from my place just outside the local school.
For ~2.5 hours it HALTED traffic in/out of a couple of 800+ house developments because the bomb was right at the intersection going into the places and it was all dead-end past that intersection.
It took maybe two hours for a bomb disposal crew to show up, then they futzed with whatever it was for another half hour.
Informative stuff actually - now I know for fact that Palm Beach does have a bomb disposal capability and at least two bomb disposal suits and the people doing it seem fairly competent.
The sheriff's ability to disseminate information to the hundreds of cars stuck behind this drama was *ZERO*. Rude morons were driving in the left lane to get past parked cars only to be stopped short as they got near the bomb area. Others were honking horns and getting irritable.
It wasn't until I and a couple of other guys started walking down the lines of cars dispensing info to drivers that it was a bomb situation that the rudeness started calming down. The sheriff only provided one officer on my road to run the road block - obviously he couldn't leave that post, so nobody was available to dispense info. A chopper with a bullhorn would have helped a lot.
Was it a real bomb? I can't answer that question - I had someplace to go and didn't stick around after the all-clear was given.
2 comments:
I was walking into the terminal at LAX a few years ago when all of the the gate agents left thier stations and swept everyone out onto the sidewalk. I looked around and traffic was stopped by the cops for as far as I could see.
Word spread to take cover as there was a bomb inside the terminal and of course this was before IED became a household word. Next an LAPD Bomb Squad truck pulls up and a few minutes after that the "fire in the hole" was shouted with a resultant thump. When I finally got back into the terminal, you could smell the burnt explosives and the weirdest thing was that the area was covered in what looked like clumps of dog hair. One of the agents told me that was supposed to throw off the scent dogs (didn't work).
But back to your point, nothing, absolutely nothing was on any of LA's many TV or radio stations.
Traffic was backed up into LAX for over four hours and nothing ever made the news.
Sure makes you think that the news is packaged doesn't it?
I'm thinking maybe they don't want to stampede the sheep...
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