VIDEO: Threat on Union was just a game
A high-tech treasure hunt spawned a four-hour bomb scare near a medical clinic in central Colorado Springs on Wednesday afternoon, briefly tangling traffic along a busy stretch of North Union Boulevard.
Police said someone planted a small geocaching capsule in a vacant field near the Summit Medical Clinic, 1605 N. Union Blvd., and stoked fears of a possible bomb threat on the day that a doctor's car was bombed in West Memphis, Ark.
Geocaching is a game in which people hide objects and then post coordinates on the Internet so that others can find them using GPS devices.
Police were told that a suspicious person had left something in the field about 12:40 p.m.
Police found a length of steel pipe with a wire sticking out that had apparently been discarded in the field, leading officers to believe that both objects were potential threats.
"They have all the makings of a pipe bomb," Colorado Springs police Cmdr. Rod Walker said earlier in the day. Walker leads the police bomb squad and said investigators used a robot equipped with a camera to examine the objects.
The Galileo School of Math and Science, 1600 N. Union Blvd., was on lockdown during the scare, and portions of Mt. Everett and Mt. Vernon streets were evacuated. Union was closed to traffic while police blew up the suspected bomb.
Afterward, they determined that the pipe was never a threat and that the second object was an empty Chapstick tube containing a "log book" for geocaching players to sign upon discovering it.
Geocaching is usually played in parks or in isolated forests in the mountains, police said.
It's not unheard of for urban games to lead to scares like the one on Wednesday.
"The bomb squad has probably had a dozen of these calls in the last two or three years," said officer Steve Pugsley, a bomb squad technician.
Police had not found the person responsible for depositing the capsule, but they were unlikely to pursue charges if they did, Pugsley said.
"There's nothing wrong with playing a game," he said.
