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Geocaching Shuts Down British Town
DaveAtWorkAnnoyingly writes "Many geocachers will be thinking twice when planting their treasure in an urban space as one geocacher found out in England after the police cordoned off the center of a small West Yorkshire town and the Bomb Squad was called in. From the article: 'It was a normal busy Friday morning in the small West Yorkshire market town of Wetherby when someone working in a café spotted a man acting a bit suspiciously on the street. He appeared to have a small plastic box in his hand and after fiddling with the container he bent down and hid it under a flower box standing on the pavement. He then walked off, talking to somebody on his phone.'"
People need to lighten up. This is getting out of hand.
Often times caches specifically state "DO NOT SEARCH IN VIEW OF MUGGLES". "Muggles" being those unfamiliar with geocaching. This is a perfect reason why to heed those words.
no, honestly, this is dumb. the terrorists have won.
Isn't this the very goal of terrorism? To disrupt our daily activities with irrational fear?
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I wonder what was actually inside O.O
Bomb scare!
I'm sure there are dozens of other instances of this happening around the world since the whole geocaching thing started.
What study was that? Because it goes against the actual research I've seen on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Really? A bomb... that's a danger to people on the street... yet small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand?
A charge probably twice the one that fits on one palm can penetrate 650 mm of armor
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Really? A bomb... that's a danger to people on the street... yet small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand? Is shrapnel really considered a terrorist threat nowadays?
They're called "Hand Grenades" for a reason, you know. It's because they can fit in the palm of one's hand. And they have a long history of being a danger to people.
Or did he think its antimatter explosion would eradicate the entire city block?
No, but he probably thought that a modern anti-personnel grenade was capable of throwing fragments over two hundred meters away. That makes for an area about _five_ city blocks long that could get quite uncomfortable for passers-by, with a "what's left of you will wish you were dead" zone about a third of a city block across at the centre. The real thing is nothing at all like Counter-Strike.
But, you know what? You're right. I'm just being silly. After all, nobody ever sets off bombs in England, so I'm sure there's no reason for anyone to worry about anything. Ever.
FTA:
He also questions putting caches in urban areas.
"If you feel as though you have to do that, then perhaps contact the police, let us know where it is, give us a description and perhaps a picture and a contact number would be very useful."
Had this been the US, anyone still considering this would probably just be arrested for supporting terrorism.
This used to happen a bunch, until the public became familiar with geocaching, and years ago geocaching guidelines changed to encourage clear plastic containers rather than the more robust menacing ammo cans that were favored initially (far more weather tight).
Ironically, letterboxing is an activity that has been popular across the pond for decades, and involves the exact same process of hiding a container somewhere publicly accessible.
But, you still will get over zealous officials who want to play with their toys and blow tupperware up, rather than look at the note on the container, or, you know, investigate.
Link to the archived geocache listing (for which you need an account to view)
Particularly troubling is this quote from the cache owner referring to the finder, "When I asked as to his fate, the policeman said it would be wrong to tell me what had happened to him but that he had been dealt with without going to court, but it would likely affect his future career. Read into that what you will."
I could see considering arresting the woman who called emergency services over nothing, then releasing her give her honest mistake. But doing more than questioning the finder and placer? Preposterous.
So was the small plastic box in his hand the phone he was talking on, or did he 'appear' to have something in both hands?
How would he have fiddled with the box with both hands full? Or was he fiddling with the phone? He must have fiddled with the phone in order to fiddle with the box, as if he wasn't talking on the phone when fiddling with the box he would have to fiddle with the phone afterwards in order to dial a call. Which would call into question the recorded sequence of events. It would only seem likely that he hid the box, then placed a call, and walked off while the call was going through.
The most likely hypothesis however is that the deed was carried out by a three armed perpetrator, holding the box in one hand, talking on the phone with the other, and using his extraneous appendage to "fiddle with the box".
Obviously a sign of an alien borne geocaching mind control conspiracy, the clued-in CIA and NSA providing a stand in human fall guy should it draw attention from the local bobbies.
wow, I didn't know about geo-caching. And now that I know, I don't see myself participating, ever! This doesn't even have to do with fear of terrorism - picking up a box with unknown contents, packed by a stranger - why do people do it?
On my daily walks with the dog i one day spotted something in a silver box near the path and found it was a small aluminium box. I personally did not think that it could be related to geocaching at all and called the local polica station and asked them what to do, as in this case it was me who was afraid to touch or open it because i thought this is a bomb ... Well, one of the first things this police officer said was
"i bet this is one of those geocaching boxes, that is not uncommon these days" :-)
So i asked him: "shall i really open it"
officer: "yes, open it"
"and what if it is a bomb and i blow up?"
officer: "then i will keep my ears shut!"
of course there was nothing interesting in this box and no bomb at all. but i really had to laugh about this quite cool and funny officer
Lord "not Gargamel's Cat!" Azrael
... after all, she goes around hiding strange packages every year.
While some disgust was expressed over a local ad campaign called, "report the suspicious, not the strange", it is essentially correct: we should be reporting suspicious activities, but there is a definite role for discretion.
Sometimes you can even ask the person what they're doing and discover, "hey, this geocaching thing is cool."
Fragmentation grenades aren't nearly as lethal as you implicate. 200 meters is not an effective radius, it's an extreme radius, under ideal conditions (no obstructions, like TFS's container, etc). It might kill 1 or 2 people in the immediate proximity and injure/maim a handful of others. Hardly a concern-worthy threat.
A military-tech grenade also likely wouldn't fit "in a small plastic box in his hand" (max est. height: 2in).
He appeared to have a small plastic box in his hand and after fiddling with the container he bent down and hid it under a flower box standing on the pavement. He then walked off, talking to somebody on his phone.'"
Why attack a flower box? I had heard the terrorists wanted to take us back to the Dark Ages, but, in this case, the assumption appears to be that they are trying to take us all the way back to the Triassic, before the dawn of angiosperms.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
He appeared to have a small plastic box in his hand and after fiddling with the container he bent down and hid it under a flower box standing on the pavement. He then walked off, talking to somebody on his phone.
Why attack a flower box? I had heard the terrorists wanted to take us back to the Dark Ages, but, in this case, the assumption appears to be that they are trying to take us all the way back to the Triassic, before the dawn of angiosperms.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
This is not an over-reaction. Here in the UK, terrorism on such a scale used to happen pretty regularly- for example, see the children killed in the second attack here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrington_bomb_attacks. Political agreement in Northern Ireland mostly halted the war, but one positive thing that came out of September 11th was the extinguishing of monies and good-will from the US for any sort of terrorism.
The headline should be "Terror paranoia shuts down british town", geocaching was only involved by random chance. If you write about it, name the real culprit.
Yeah, but that's a shape charge. You don't use those to try and kill people, and the explosive really needs to be in contact (or so bloody close it doesn't matter) to get those kinds of effects. Only a moron tries to kill people with a shaped charge.
Now there are cases where people tried to do assassinations with shape charges, but they were used to propel a metal plate at a car, so it's like a big shotgun effect with spalling. Although that sucker was crammed in a mailbox, and the car was probably no more than 10 feet away if I remember right.
Why was he given a police caution ? He did nothing illegal, nothing that police had previously been asked to be told about, so why a caution ? Yes what he did accidentally caused some disruption; but this was not intended.
Boston has massively overreacted to so much innocuous stuff over the past few years I had fully expected it to be them again.
This time it was the U.K., go figure...
Should I understand that you agree with the OP when saying: "Being afraid of what can fit into a palm is idiotic"?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Many geocachers will be thinking twice when planting their treasure
Unfortunately no one will be thinking twice before re-enacting their own version of chicken little and calling the police for every little thing.
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
I may have been living under a rock...
but yeah understandably if someone leaves a 'bomb' you'd take precautions.
I'd say it was of concern to that 1 or 2 people. And the 150 per person friend group.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Really? A bomb... that's a danger to people on the street... yet small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand? Is shrapnel really considered a terrorist threat nowadays? Or did he think its antimatter explosion would eradicate the entire city block?
So what your saying is that throwing a hand grenade into Oxford high-street should not be considered a terrorist threat?
Very recent domestic terrorists in the UK have performed this exact same activity to achieve disastrous results. It's not like the states where some assholes flew a plane into a building 10 years ago, innocent-looking packages are still a real and justified concern.
As the performing parties, it's geocachers who need to be aware of this fact, and take caution to avoid unnecessary suspicion of their activities.
I've cached for a number of years, and learned the benefits of having a quick chat with local businesses before planting full-on urban caches. Not only could it put them at ease, but it's also another group of people that would be "in the know" should someone unfamiliar with the sport panic about it.
The main thing that I found was that, in nearly all cases, local businesses were thrilled with the idea of a dedicated group of people actively travelling to an area near to their business! Many went so far as to pass a few coupons along to hide in the cache, or offer a 'cacher discount' if people mentioned the cache when paying up at the counter.
Of course it's concern-worthy, but the difficulty is taking a balanced approach - taken to its extreme you're saying anyone who plants anything the size of the palm of a hand or larger in a populated area warrants a police bomb disposal squad because it's not worth the risk. Ever notice how many discarded drinks cans there are lying around? Any one of them could contain a hand grenade - should we call the police every time we see a yob throw a can on the ground?
Found one GC1WPTQ that has a note from July 3 "Disabled at the request of the police ..."
The best thing is the previous find where the player wrote "My word this took some finding - amongst the trying to look natural as muggles walking doggles streamed by"
Yes, but you have to consider the likelihood of this actually being a bomb and causing damage, v.s. the hassle and disruption it causes if you call the police and it isn't.
Granted the disruption is pretty small, but the chances of this being a bomb are practically zero.
The Inverse Square law applies to fragmentation munitions. At 200m from the device, chances of a) encountering a piece of shrapnel, and b) that piece of shrapnel having sufficient kinetic energy to seriously wound, are incredibly slim.
Want to work it out? 0.5(4/3[pi]r^3) for the radius of the blast, and divide that by the surface area of each piece of shrapnel. I'd wager you come out with a probability of contact around seven decimal places.
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And what's to stop a bomber writing 'geocache - contents harmless" on their bomb?
Must.... resist..... argh can't hold back:
DUH!
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
>>No, but he probably thought that a modern anti-personnel grenade was capable of throwing fragments over two hundred meters away.
Throwing fragments is not the same as causing injuries. The casualty radius on a M67 is 15 meters, with a kill radius of 5 meters. (http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/m67.htm)
In my quake mod I implemented a grenade that actually launched fragments and would bounce off walls, allowing you to hit people around a corner. It was amazing how many fragments you'd have to launch in order to reliably hit someone even 20 feet away. Expanding radius of a sphere and all that.
The Inverse Square law applies to fragmentation munitions.
Does it? I kind of thought that the inverse square law relied on things moving radially outwards in all directions in three dimensions. Here on Earth all of the shrapnel is going to end up on the ground - a two dimensional surface.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
The casualty radius on a M67 is 15 meters, with a kill radius of 5 meters
Which gives you a rough diameter of 30m, or about one third of an average 79m city block. It's good to see that you agree with me.
MORE people need to GEOCACHE .. this is probably the best promotion for it ever!!! .. whoot!
Stupidity. That's the only thing to blame here. Utterly retarded extreme drooling idiocy.
Spoken like a true American. In the UK in the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's we suffered a bombing campaing in mainland Britain from the American funded IRA. They planted bombs outside restaurants, pubs, shopping centers and didn't give a shit who they killed. Recently there has been an upsurge in terrorism in Ireland from some of the factions who didn't sign up to the agreement. Not to report this as suspicious would be retarded extreme drooling idiocy.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Yeah, but that's a shape charge. You don't use those to try and kill people, and the explosive really needs to be in contact (or so bloody close it doesn't matter) to get those kinds of effects. Only a moron tries to kill people with a shaped charge.
Isn't a claymore mine a shaped charge though?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Is it the People's Front of Judea, or the Judean People's Front?
SPLITTER!!!!
It might kill 1 or 2 people in the immediate proximity and injure/maim a handful of others.
Well, according to military handbooks the fatality radius is about 5 meters, casualty radius about 15 meters. For unarmored, fully exposed civilians I think you can say at least that. I guess it depends on how crowded, but 10 meters length of sidewalk could easily be way more than 1-2 deaths. If the cafe had large glass windows then probably several guests there as well, and I wouldn't feel too safe in a passing car either if you were next right to it.
A military-tech grenade also likely wouldn't fit "in a small plastic box in his hand" (max est. height: 2in).
True because of the pin and handle but a 2 inch square box has room for roughly as much explosives as a M67 hand grenade (131 vs 134 mL). So for a bomb with radio detonator and grenade-like effect it's actually sufficient. But yes, it does make it much less likely, for a possibility that was rather unlikely to begin with.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I never saw it stated somewhere officially but my own experience points to the conclusion that indeed Berlin police checks on Caches listed on geocaching.com. There is one in Berlin (http://coord.info/GC2XDG3) by the name "BrandVerein" which would translate to FireAssociation. The name actually is a hint to the cache's location, if you go there, it's obvious.
Still, that name hit a spot with the police since for some years there is this series of expensive cars burning at night and lots of pressure on the cops for not being able to stop the serial igniter(s).
So, the first day the cache was published 2 searchers there found themselves under surveillance when they followed the gps compass. An officer stepped out of the car, to the exact koords of the cache and told them to go on searching. When they found the box, the officer took a look, approved it for being harmless, wished them good luck and left the scene.
Cool and efficient
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
FTFA: Although this appears to be an episode executed in good faith from all sides, it left traders in a busy town out of pocket and the last geocacher to find the box outside Karen's café with a police caution.
Exactly what offense did the geocacher commit in this case? Is acting in a manner somebody might possibly find suspect now a crime in the UK?
Terrorism isn't something new. It's been around for eons and how its been dealt with has just changed. There is a reason why we see uniformed armies, its to distinguish the fighting forces of a nation from the civilian population. Why is this important for reasons other than not to hurt civilians? It's important because it shows that if you conquer a nation, you don't have to commit genocide, the people will go along with whomever is in charge.
Now in the modern era, we have become "civilized" but this comes at a high price. Our populations have to deal with the continued threat of reprisals from groups that are only encouraged to do more reprisals. Governments thrive on this because frankly, these days governments derive their power from fear.
In America, our history shows how to deal with "terrorists". The native, aboriginal Americans, aka Indians, fought gorilla warfare against us and by modern definition would be considered terrorists. We responded with genocide, and containment. Had we not done this, we would still be fighting skirmishes with them, and people living in the countryside would be worried about getting scalped. Sure, your inner hippie can be repulsed by this, but the mechanics of it are pretty sound.
But the modern world and all of its "civilization" give us impossible to win scenarios. The IRA situation is only on hold, we all know they will cycle back to violence eventually. The Palestinian situation will never resolve its self, even if they get their own country, they will still be wanting to blow up Israel. Enormous amounts of resources will be spent and innocent lives will be lost and in the end, we will still be in the same spot we are now.
You can't play the "civilized human game" if only one side will play it. Take the United States for example, you couldn't beat our military and expect to take over this country. We are an armed camp here that would rather die fighting than live a second under foreign rule. (at least we used to be like that, we might be a bunch of pussies now) If you were an invader, you wouldn't turn your back on any of us for a second, even old women would be trying to kill you somehow. Nor would you engage us with any traditional sense of warfare rules. We shot all the conventional rules of warfare in the head during our Revolutionary War, and I am sure that 99% of all Americans would laugh at the Geneva Convention Rules of Warfare if it came down to a war on our own country. Not only that, you couldn't just pack up and leave, we would follow you home and kill every last one of you, then dance on your graves.
Effectively, the IRA should have brought genocide to their country. If you kill every last one of them down to every man, woman and child. The problem is solved, you don't have terrorists popping up out of a population if they are all dead. Again this is back to why uniformed military are important for civilization and why adhering to this is a must unless you are willing to gamble the lives of EVERYONE in your country.
The United States understands all of this. Why do you think we "over reacted" to 9/11? We have had to fight terror with terror. We had to show the world if you come blow up buildings here, we will come blow your country to utter hell. You can't hide from us just because you don't wear a uniform. If you hide in some dipshit country who is dumb enough to harbor you, we will blow that entire country to hell. If we think that you are squirrelly and MIGHT pull some bullshit like some terrorist actions, we will blast your asses all the way back to the stone age. Consider yourselves lucky you have something we can use, like oil, or we might just nuke you off the planet. The thought we pound home with bombs is this; "don't go fucking around with America or they will come kill us all." And yes, I think the world is finally getting the point. Fuck you and your "America is a paper tiger" theory.
Oddly though, we have some kind of weird guilt about this, and when others try to do it, we get excited about it. Frankly you ca
Take the Red Pill.
Here in the US, at least the National Park Service is enough aware of goecaching that they ask (it's not even required by law, they just ask) to be informed of where caches are placed in a park. This simple notification would prevent the problem in TFA - but only if it had happened in a national park.
No, you've only committed the crime of using a "hoax device" if you've put something somewhere intended to scare people. That doesn't mean that you won't be accused of the crime for doing something that somebody freaked out about, especially if they called the police who freaked out even more, and you might even be convicted of it, but that's a different question.
In England's case, there's enough history of Irish terrorism that there are actually some legitimate reasons people might freak out, unlike, say, the Mooninite invasion of Boston.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"Fuck you!"
I read a news item a few years back? It was a commentary by a UK newspaper about when the IRA bombings first started up. People were all talking about it, of course, and it was the hot news item of the day.
One reporter went up to an elderly gentleman and asked him what he thought of the IRA bombings.
"Fuck you," he replied. "I've been bombed by professionals!"
How quintessentially British.
And how wonderfully appropriate for our times. We, as a race, need to learn how to say "Fuck you!" to the terrorists, whether they carry a holy book or a law book. When someone comes up to us, shoving a microphone in our face and asking us, all a-twitter, "ARE YOU SCARED?!? ARE YOU AFRAID?!?"
We should simply say, "Fuck you! Of course I'm scared, but I'm not going to stop living my life?"
"Fuck you."
It's a phrase we humans need to use more often.
[End Of Line]
It was amazing how many fragments you'd have to launch in order to reliably hit someone even 20 feet away. Expanding radius of a sphere and all that.
This would be why a fragmentation grenade is designed to launch hundreds of fragments. A lot of people seem to think that the only fragmentation is whatever pieces the casing breaks up into; in reality, the casing causes very little fragmentation. The interior of the grenade contains a metallic wrap which is designed to fragment into hundreds of pieces, each smaller than a toothpick. You'd have a hell of a time replicating that in your quake mod.
My new claim to fame, my brother in law sparks a bomb scare.
Even better, he was watching out of his window when all of this was going on ( he can see the site of the cache from his kitchen - he likes to see who's using it ), ringing my wife in a blind panic asking what he should do. My wife was very helpful and gave him advice about not dropping the soap. He didn't laugh.
The NPS does not allow the placing of physical caches in National Parks. The only caches allowed are Virtual/Earthcaches.
Look, it was a mistake. It happens. The police need to walk it off and be glad it wasn't something more serious instead of handing out bogus cautions that do not sound very legal. Misuse of police power is just as bad as terrorism, besides, at the end of the day that's the wrong message we should be focusing on. Let the thoughtless geocaching jerk off with a warning instead of giving him a questionable caution so he can slink away into obscurity and we can concentrate on the real hero.... the guy who reported it. Now more than ever It's good to look out for one another. It was harmless this time, next time it could save someone's life. That guy is awesome.
Just my two cents.
"He was hiding some small container in a flower box, so naturally I assumed it was some kind of surveillance device." The three FBI agents surveilling him arrested him on the spot.
Fandroids hate facts.
To repost a link posted elsewhere in this thread:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/deadly-bomb-was-size-of-lunchbox-2261949.html
That one killed 29 people, I seem to recall. Omagh Bombing, if you want to find out more.
Also, as another poster pointed out, a hand-grenade being set off on a busy shopping street wouldn't exactly be a barrel of fun either.
Yeah, but that's a shape charge. You don't use those to try and kill people, and the explosive really needs to be in contact (or so bloody close it doesn't matter) to get those kinds of effects. Only a moron tries to kill people with a shaped charge.
You are assuming that the first bomb is supposed to kill many people, instead of getting a lot of rescue workers near the second bomb. You're an easy victim.
Fandroids hate facts.
>>You'd have a hell of a time replicating that in your quake mod.
It's easy enough. There's a for loop that spits out fragments, mostly horizontally (so we can avoid wasting fragments that will just hit the ceiling) and you can adjust the constant that controls how many shards are launched. So you can turn it up arbitrarily high (until you hit the entity limit in the world). You also increase the size of the bounding box so that they fill more space when they launch.
But mostly I just turned up the damage on the shards.
On certain maps with tight, twisty corridors, the frag grenades were quite good. Big open spaces? Not so much.
Facetious troll is facetious.
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