“The sky is falling. The sky is falling,” said Henny Penny.
I slipped down the back way to Lincoln Road, which runs between Walmart and the shopping center, for my massage appointment. A girl stood in the parking lot talking on her phone, and just inside the glass door stood Deborah, the massage therapist. I had a sense something was up.
Deborah stepped out, “How did you get here?”
“The back way,” I told her. “What’s going on?”
“Didn’t you see? The streets are blocked off. Walmart has a bomb threat.”
We walked to the corner of the shopping center and, sure enough, dozens of Walmart workers were lined up at the east end of the parking lot along with fire trucks and emergency responders. In front of the Walmart doors were scads of policemen.
Deborah said, “If you’d rather reschedule it’s OK.”
I blew it off saying, “Really, how many times is a bomb threat real when they actually call it in?”
Within minutes Deborah got a call from a friend at WCBI that the “all clear” had been given.
The next day the newspaper reported Columbus Police Department Interim Chief Fred Shelton as saying the threat was made by an elementary-aged juvenile.
The whole situation made me wonder about the percentages of bomb threats that are real. You know you can Google just about anything, so I did.
Tim Dees, a retired cop and criminal justice professor with the Reno (Nevada) Police Department, said 99 percent of the threats are hoaxes because warnings are counter-productive to the bomber’s goal of causing mayhem.
Another website posted a former university police dispatcher who stated bomb threats during exam times were a regular occurrence. The student would go to class and get the test; then asked to be excused to go to the restroom, where they would call in the bomb threat for that building and return to the classroom. The building would be evacuated and the test postponed.
The professor would then have to reschedule the test and make a new test, or use the old test that by then all the students had seen. Another post reported most bomb threats take place in the spring … maybe spring fever. And another post by a law enforcement officer said only 5-10 percent of bomb threats were real. Even if it was only 1 percent, real bomb threats cannot be taken lightly.
A few weeks before the Walmart threat a news report said a guy in a Delta prison made a bomb threat to our local hospital. Imagine the hardship and danger involved in trying to evacuate a hospital. It’s bad enough people are in the hospital because they are very sick and possibly dying or they’re having serious operations and their families are all packed in waiting rooms hoping for some kind of good news, when they get a bomb threat.
All I can say is we have come a very long way from childish prank calls like “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” or “Did you know your refrigerator is running?”
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