Some of you know that one of my hobbies is geocaching. For the blissfully ignorant, geocaching works this way: People put some trinkets in a container and hide it somewhere. They post the coordinates (latitude and longitude, accurate to a couple of meters) on a website. Others then use a gps to find the hidden stuff. There are some details, but they are unimportant. There’s also some good physics involved, but we don’t need to go into it now. It’s a fun activity, and a good excuse (if one is needed) for a walk in the woods. I enjoy geocaching when I travel to a new city, as I typically get led to interesting places that I otherwise would never see. There are about a million and a half geocaches hidden around the world, including several hundred around London.  One of the small pleasures of the game is that it’s a little bit subversive – you have to sneak around to find the caches, and you’re not supposed to let the un-initiated know what or where they are. Cachers occasionally get asked what they are up to by various authority figures. It’s all part of the fun.

While we were visiting my in-laws in Victoria this weekend, my sister-in-law pointed out this news article to me: http://www.timescolonist.com/news/Bomb+squad+called+after+suspicious+object+found+tree/6612573/story.html

The gist of it is that someone had found a suspicious object hidden in a tree. The bomb squad had been called out, and after several hours of doing I don’t know what, they determined that the object in question was not in fact a pipe bomb, but a geocache. I thought this was pretty funny. I wondered if this sort of thing had happened before, and in fact it had: in Toronto, just a few days earlier. Here’s the story on that one:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/offbeat/story/2012/05/10/pipe-bomb-scare-geocaching.html

In this case, authorities confined local residents to their houses for three hours while the bomb squad blew up the suspicious container. This cache had been sitting in plain view, attached to a lamp post with cable ties, for more than a month, but apparently it didn’t become a potential bomb until last week. There have been other incidents as well – I found information about one in North Carolina, and another in Colorado Springs.

I suppose such incidents end up costing taxpayers lots of money. I find it hard to get mad at geocachers about this, though. Instead, I take it as a sad commentary on our collective mindset that otherwise rational people would conclude that a piece of plastic pipe hidden in plain view in a public space must be a bomb, rather than something totally innocent. I also find it odd that bomb experts would reach the same conclusion, even after looking carefully at said pipe. Surely there are ways to determine whether that pipe contains trinkets rather than explosives without spending hours at it, without detonating it, and without terrifying all the neighbours. What about using those swabs they always wipe over my laptop at the airport, for example? Or bringing in one of those bomb-sniffing dogs? Or, for that matter, what about going to the geocahcing web site and checking to see if there is a cache listed at the location in question? Perhaps bomb squaddies should put a geocaching app on their mobile phones, so they can easily do this!

Certainly one lesson from this is that geocachers should be careful to hide their caches where people prone to panic are unlikely to find them. Another is that a lot of people need to chill out a bit. Don’t forget, there are another 1.5 million of them still out there!