themood

No of course not. As long as we are placing caches in urban areas this will continue to be a problem. Hopefully labeling them will help some knucklehead from calling in the first place

Sorry about the duplicate post folks, I wrote this one before I saw the others. As a first responder I can tell you that the response will probably be the same whether they are labeled or not. I was thinking more about the general public that sees us placing or replacing a cache and calls it in, maybe if it is clearly marked it could help prevent the call in the first place. As a bonus it might spark their interest to find out what the heck geocaching is and get them caching themselves!! I can also tell you that in this area the bomb squads respond to over 10 calls a day for suspicious objects and do not have the time or luxury of checking to see if they "might" be geocaches for several reasons. First of all the longer the object is unattended the greater the chance of someone setting it off if it is live. Also, if you call them they will come. Imagine the liability if they were to disregard a reported object because of something they saw on the internet and someone was injured or killed. They don't have that luxury.

I work for the Fire Department that responded to this. First of all to everyone that says that the problem is that people need to think before calling in a bomb scare-or any type of emergency response- you are completely right. Unfortunately most people are just too lazy or lack the common sense to do do so. To everyone that has made statements about the overkill in the response or the fact that it took so long to get anything done, it must be nice to be an armchair expert calling a play by play from a two paragraph newspaper article. Everything was done with the safety of the rescuers and the local population in mind. These operations do not move quickly they move safely. Is it likely that there was a bomb in a film canister in front of a Wal Mart? Nope. Is it Possible? Absolutely. The bomb squad boys don't have the luxury of just assuming that since an object is small or innocent looking or in an unlikely spot that it is harmless. They have to follow the same protocol whether it is a film canister or a mortar round and again this is for THEIR safety and YOURS. In my opinion the question we should be asking is how can we all help prevent something like this from happening in the future. We can't change dumb people but we can be discrete when we are in public and label our caches on the outside to help with this. Will it stop these responses? Nope, but remember the more money these type of caches cost cities and local business owners and end up as 6 o'clock news stories, the more likely it is to be outlawed in cities. Oh yeah and to the poster who made the comment about bombs only having a one hour timer- are you for real? Maybe a little less time watching 24. Regards, the mood

Greetings everyone, I have heard rumors over the last year or so of different cities "outlawing" geocaching due to the way people can react when they see an unidentified package and call in a potential bomb. Well I am a firefighter/paramedic for a fairly large Southern California fire department and yesterday it happened to us. We ended up with 12 fire engines as well as a Hazardous Materials response team, a bomb squad and over a dozen police officers to investigate what turned out to be a pill container hidden under a lightpost skirt. Someone saw the cachers placing it back in it's hiding spot and called the authorities. Since it was in a very busy shopping center there was a huge potential for collateral damage and a need for a lot of manpower to potentially assist in rescue, evacuation, cleanup etc. This ended up resulting in about 60-65 public safety personnel responding to a Geocache and since so many resources were on scene it ended up being neccesary to move fire engines all around the city to fill in the gaps, caused a delayed response to a house fire with a trapped victim and probably delayed responses to multiple medical aids as we are the provider of local emergency medical services. I would like to propose that all cachers label on the OUTSIDE of each cache that their container is a geocache to help prevent such instances. Something like the explanation sheet we place inside that states "Official Geocaching Gamepiece" or something. It doesn't need to be fancy but should be clearly visible if the cache is found. Will it prevent future incidents? Of course not, but I believe that it will be beneficial and that it is important to try and keep the sport being shown in a positive light, not as a substantial burden to taxpayers on a 6 o'clock news story. The Mood