Man, I don’t know what it is about the East Coast¹, but the New Haven CT Police department has a solid entry for “Chickenshit of the Year”, for summoning a massive response to a running group who marked their course with flour. The group is named the Hash House Harriers, who according to the article, are

a worldwide group that bills itself as a “drinking club with a running problem.”

Heh. Sounds like a great club to me. Except for the running.

They spread some flour around their proposed route, and, again from the article:

inadvertently caused a bioterrorism scare.

How do you “advertently” cause a bioterrorism scare? Evidently by having the New Haven Police sound an alarm, summoning help from far and wide, evacuating the Ikea in whose parking lot the offending flour had been sprinkled.  When the dreaded flour people heard about the incident, they rode their bikes to the Ikea, told the cops it was flour, and were charged with a felony for their civic-mindedness.

The flour people have spread flour in parking lots across the country; but only New Haven was addled and paranoid enough to press the big terror panic button. New Haven also plans to seek restitution from the flour people for the police time.  Someone has to pay for the screw-up, after all.

Finally, there’s this choice bit from a spokesman for the New Haven Mayor:

“You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,” she said. “It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious. We’re thankful it wasn’t, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out.”

Umm, didn’t the perpetrators tell the cops what the material was? Otherwise, I think the cops would still be investigating.
-k-

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