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Another Arlington school shut by a bomb threat
By adamg on Tue, 01/19/2016 - 11:29am
Arlington High School got a bomb threat shortly before 9 a.m. today, Arlington Police report. Students and staff were initially told to shelter in place, but then students were sent home for the day as a precaution even after police determined the threat - that backpacks would explode and students be shot - was not credible.
Boston Police sent a K9 unit in to help ensure the school is safe.
State Police report that, as with Friday's threats, several schools in eastern Massachusetts were targeted.
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Comments
:-(
A) It's finals week in a lot of schools.
B) Ayer, Newton North HS, Farmington (NH) HS, Plymouth South Middle School, Tewksbury Memorial HS also received threats per (@Stacos)
C) I understand the extreme need for caution during these threats, (and realistically, nobody will get any work done the rest of the day) but how can anyone say the threat isn't credible, and then decide to still cancel classes? As a precaution against what?
Its a precaution against the
Its a precaution against the .01% chance that it could be real. As with any terrorist threat, no one, politicians or public officials want to be in a situation where people were hurt and it could have been prevented.
That is why it is called terrorism. It is to instill fear and cause reaction rather then any real damage.
I am actually more worried about the kids from these false threats. I hope they are getting some counseling to put this into perspective that even through there are many threats the chance of a real attack is almost nil.
odds
If there's a 0.01% chance (grossly over the actual odds) it could be real, is there also not the same chance that the attacker is calling in the threat to evacuate the building and then is actually planning to attack the throngs of students and teachers and staff massed outside the building?
Eh
The kids probably aren't taking it seriously.
We had crap like this happen in high school (around the 9-11 period, so people took it seriously) and usually a) the person who set up the threat was found among their friends laughing hysterically about HOW FUNNY it was that THE WHOLE SCHOOL believed our dumb prank! and b) the affected students all rolled their eyes and couldn't believe the adults in charge fell for a stupid stoner prank.
Everyone would take the free day off, but everyone knew it was ridiculous.
What do people not
understand about "threat not credible "?
Finals week?
In January? Really?
it would have been
in my high school. we had 4 90 minute classes a day and classes changed in january if i recall
Yes, first term finals
BLS is in the middle of finals right now, for example - I assume other BPS schools are too. Been that schedule for years, as far as I can tell.
Warnings
Has there been any times in recent history where a would-be bomber/shooter called their target to issue a vague warning about what they were going to do?
In the few real bombings/shootings I can't recall a time they warned their target first. Conversely, have any of these warnings resulted in finding actual bombs?
Basque
ETA always phoned in the bombs, I suppose in the attempt to make a statement without significant casualties. Not sure any lone madmen ever did so.
More like a "lone phoneman"
http://boston.cbslocal.com/2016/01/19/schools-clos...
There is also an apparent outbreak of the same crazy in New Jersey.
Prior to Jersey too
The Delmarva region (eastern MD, Delaware, eastern VA) had about a dozen schools called between 2 different days. Same MO. Except some of the loonier people down there think it's ISIS out testing response times and not some random kid with an internet VOIP system hidden behind a proxy or two.
Also, research in the area of bomb threats and schools shows that nearly all bombs in schools aren't warned/phoned in and nearly all phone threats never have anything to do with real bombs.
http://www.popcenter.org/problems/bomb_threats/
The IRA
almost always gave an advance warning in coded messages to media outlets.
Nope, and I pointed this out
Nope, and I pointed this out in several recent threads about crap like this until I realized people are more interested in being scared than rational.
Real terrorists don't call in bomb threats. "Suspicious packages" never turn out to be bombs. Actual planted bombs are never found before they detonate, even when they're in an obvious suspicious package like a dropped backpack.
But rational responses to terrorism doesn't sell the taxpayers on more cops, more SWAT teams, more armored vehicles and fully automatic assault rifles for cops, so don't expect rational responses anytime soon.
I suspect that most of the reaction
to threats is not fear of the terrorists, but fear of the lawyers who will crawl out of the woodwork should the 0.0001 percent probability that a bomb will actually go off proves to be true.
Los Palmas Airport in 1976
Which indirectly led to what remains the single deadliest airline crash in history- the collision of two 747s on the runway at Tenerifie.
Were it not for the bomb threat that closed Los Palamas, neither 747 would have wound up at Tenerifie that day.
9 Schools in NJ have also recieved threats
Per Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-new-jersey-threat-idUSKCN0UX21C
crazy world
terror threats and bombs and stuff were just not something we dealt with when i was in school
Nonsense
Nonsense.
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/13/136287845/a-16-year-hunt-for-new-yorks-mad...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Metesky
Do you think there were no crazed people before 20 years ago?
are you really arguing
that i did or didnt deal with bomb threats and other terroristic things?
He's saying you were oblivious to them
Which is to say, you were probably a myopic swiss-cheese-brained teen most of the time, just like the rest of us.
Stuff happened, you just didn
Stuff happened, you just didn't live in the era of overreaction where entire schools are shut because of one phone call or a city block is shut down and the bomb squad called in over a piece of litter found in the street.
In the 70s
there was a period when someone was calling bombs threats regularly into the BPL main library. Everyone had to leave their work, go outside, and wait for the building to be cleared.
I agree, I remember the 70's
I agree, I remember the 70's bomb threats to the BPL. We also had them at our school and just ignored them.
The 70's were a time of many radicals in Europe. I remember hearing quite frequently the number of bombings in Italy, Spain and England/ No. Ireland.
This is nothing new, but times have changed and maybe I won't ignore the called in bomb threats as we did in the past.
"but times have changed"
Have they? Is there world any more dangerous today than in 1976?
Perception and reality
I think it depends on what you mean by "dangerous" and what you mean by "the world". My sense of things is that stay-at-home Americans are not really under any more threat than they were in the 1970s, but they feel as if they are. Americans abroad, I think, are more targeted now than in the past. That's not getting into what the world is like for non-Americans.
world no more dangerous for Americans now
More under threat now? I grew up in the 70s too, and bombings, shooting, hijackings, kidnappings, hostage situations, etc. were just as much in the news of the day then as now.
It's just that we as a culture used to be exposed to just an hour or so of news each day. Now it's in our face constantly 24/7/365. Check the Bureau of Justice Statistics or the CIA Factbook, and you'll see that this country and the world have actually been getting pretty consistently safer for the last 50 years.
"in the news" vs. reality
Yes, Jeff, I also grew up in the '70s, and yes, bombings shootings were in the news. But who were they actually affecting? Who was targeted? The IRA didn't target Americans, not in the US and not abroad. Neither did ETA, or the Bader-Meinhof gang, or the various Palestinian terrorist groups, or the Japanese Red Army, or the Tupamaros. This is different from today, where there are terrorist groups for whom the USA is, if not enemy number 1, at least on the short list. I think that this is having rather more of an effect on Americans abroad than was the case in the '70s -- there are numerous cases of Americans targeted as Americans, and also of Americans targeted because they're westerners. This is different from the '70s where an American abroad might be an incidental casualty of an attack aimed at a different target or population.
Oh for pete's sake! RTFI!
And please, check your provincialism - most terror attacks outside of the US have nothing to do with Americans, either then or now.
Oh for pete's sake! STFU!
And please, check your condescension -- I said nothing to indicate otherwise. You've got an agenda, don't read into what I write.
Hijackings
You have forgotten about the hijackings in the 1970s.
Also, much safer to travel Europe now that emergency response is usually coordinated well and vehicles all meet some basic safety standards.
No, I haven't
No, I haven't. How many hijackings in the 1970s can you name that targeted Americans because they were Americans?
A lot of risks are very much lower
Crime is way down. The 70s were pretty extreme for that.
Also, cars are very much safer (even if we have to use them more), and your risk of dying in a fire is much lower than it used to be. If you do get burned or smashed in a car wreck, your chances of surviving are vastly better due to advances in trauma response and treatment.
There have never been a lot of predators of children, but even those stranger grabs a kid events are so extremely rare as to be vanishingly important (other than the pathologic belief in predators everywhere). 50 - 100 incidents per year is miniscule given the 75 million kids in the US.
The world is fairly safe - and it is vastly safer than in the 1970s. Go out and play already!
A friend of mine is having an actual, honest-to-god holiday in Cambodia this week. People regularly fly back and forth to China. Think about that.
I've a family member in Viet
I've a family member in Viet Nam and I would rather her there than say, Europe.
Cambodia I've heard is a beautiful country, same with Viet Nam. The pictures of a co workers honeymoon in Cambodia were breathtaking.
I'd feel safer in those parts than in parts of Europe now a days. Between the migrants and the backlash from the migrants - who wants to get caught up in that on vacation?
I don't think anyone is frightened and no one I know if has altered their life in any way.
I think so, yes.
I think so, yes.
I think the bomb threats we laughed off back in the 70's have a bit more bite to them.
But, to each their own opinion and no, I am not afraid so don't go on about "fear".
No one said you have to "live in fear" just to be more aware that this isn't 40 years ago.
Really?
Burlington High School was bombed in 1985, by a "disgruntled student".
Bad Link
This is what you want.
Anyway, the bomb these kids made only broke a few ceiling tiles and they didn't make any threats to the school before exploding it. It seems like kids were playing around and didn't know how powerful their explosives were. (They weren't terrorists.)
The idea of closing schools due to these "threats" seems questionable at best.
It was a fairly powerful bomb
Even if those kids didn't intend to do much damage, and it is obvious that they were stupid kids who thought they were pulling a prank, they could have killed someone. It was detonated next to the auditorium near a backstage entrance in a little used hallway between the music and band classrooms, and the main entrance to the auditorium. Pine Glen Elementary School had relocated to the high school for the spring semester that year due to an emergency asbestos abatement. If I recall correctly, a kindergarten or first grade class had walked through that hallway to get to their music class minutes before it went off. If their timing had been off by a few minutes, I think this would have been a more than an old AP clipping. I wonder what the reaction would be if this happened today.
I was in the fifth grade at another school in Burlington when this happened and remembered seeing the photos of the damage in the Daily Times-Chronicle, which I delivered. I was fascinated with the story because I had two friends from cub scouts who went to Pine Glen and heard the explosion (at the time I was a little jealous of them). My brother was a senior there too, but he wasn't in the building at the time.
The bomb basically blew through the metal ceiling tiles and blew a steel door off its hinges. The hallway ceilings at Burlington High School (which dates from the early 1970s) aren't soft acoustical tile sitting on a suspended frame, they're twelve by twelve inch perforated steel squares rigidly installed to the concrete ceiling above (photo of a corridor at BHS here), so it took a lot of force to break them. It had been fully repaired without a trace by the time I began there in the fall of 1988.
Sure
Prosecute the dopes.
But the point is they didn't call the school that morning and say "There could be a bomb someplace" and hang up.
We just had actual bombs
Very crude, make a bang and burn a garbage can or locker bombs, but few actual bomb scares.
Ya, we had those too but we
Ya, we had those too but we didn't close school because of them.
Hearing the urnials being blown off the walls wasn't too alarming to us, a minor interuption in our day. We weren't sent home we knew what it was and we knew who did it.
Exploding Toilets
My grandmother was a high school custodian in the 1970s, and had to replace and repair toilets that had had cherry bombs go off, or packets of drano in foil flushed down them. Seems to have been a common theme nationwide.
Stuff like this was still the
Stuff like this was still the subject of jokes a single generation ago, e.g., Bart Simpson pulling crap like this. Nowadays the entire city would be locked down for two days, 10,000 cops going house-to-house looking for the kid, and the kid would probably end up in Guantanamo.
bull
I'm 39 and we had bomb threats at least 2-3 times during my high school years. Always turned out to be some asshole who had a test that day.
You must be 75 years old then
"terror threats and bombs and stuff were just not something we dealt with when i was in school"
You must be 75 years old then, or maybe went to school in a sheltered cove somewhere. I recall a bomb threat or two when I was at Boston Latin in the early 70s. We all stood outside for a while like a fire drill, then resumed business as usual.
Saw three news trucks parked outside this afternoon
outside Arlington HS. WHDH, WCVB, and NECN. Just waiting to do live shots for the afternoon/evening news.
Bomb Threat at Medford High Today
The administration reported to state and federal agencies, even though the threat had no specific information and was extremely similar to other threats made earlier.
They checked the cameras for the past 24 hours and then did a security sweep of the school, finding nothing.
They didn't cancel school (informed parents via robocall).