During our town`s bomb scare yesterday morning on one of our busiest days of the year — Astoria Regatta with its Grand Land Parade — there was a bit of a … traffic problem. Actually you might call it The Astoria Perfect Storm. Parade floats and their handlers effectively blocked one main route through town while waiting for word from the police. Meanwhile, bomb experts blocked off the other main road through town –Commercial Street — which was part of the original parade route (just 5 blocks from my house), because the experts were about to blow up what appeared to be a bomb delivered to the door of our neighborhood recruiting center. Even smaller east-west streets were blocked off, so a ton of highway/town/tourist traffic was crawling by, or stopped at, a bad place at a bad time. Meanwhile, more and more cars from either end of Highway 30 were converging on Astoria for regatta events. Police officers had to stop the one eastbound lane of Highway 30 in order to let the one westbound lane go through town, then vice versa. An FBI agent had been called in from Portland.

At noon, the “bomb,” which resembled another fake one recently planted in Portland, was detonated by experts, and the regatta parade — though diverted slightly –- went on. The entire operation took four hours from “bomb” discovery to detonation. During those four hours, more and more traffic was piling up perilously close to ground zero, as it were. What if the bomb had been real and had exploded right there while wall-to-wall traffic was crawling by a block away? Hundreds of civilians could have been at risk. No matter how comfortably far we feel from daily terrorist bombing headlines, it’s time for us in each Oregon town to take a good hard look at our emergency preparedness plans. We need to stay alert and know what to do to help others and stay safe. We need to know alternate routes out of town. We need to ask ourselves what we’re doing to be ready, to keep a real catastrophe from crippling our own little neighborhood.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 12th, 2007 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Disaster Preparedness, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.