Somewhere in Metro Vancouver there’s a hipster who’s probably feeling pretty sheepish right now.
Metro Vancouver Transit Police and North Vancouver RCMP shut down the SeaBus and evacuated the North Vancouver SeaBus terminal for four hours during Tuesday’s evening rush hour for a suspicious package that turned out to be an old portable cassette player.
A passenger on the Burrard Beaver noticed the suspicious looking object hidden under one of the seats on board and reported it to SeaBus crew. They alerted transit police who quickly evacuated the terminal and called in their bomb sniffing dog and the RCMP’s explosives unit. The dogs did a sweep of the SeaBus terminals on both sides of Burrard Inlet while the RCMP’s explosives disposal robot went in for a closer look at the package.
“Once the robot got close enough, with the video that’s available, they could see very clearly what the object was. It was determined to be a very old Walkman,” said Anne Drennan, transit police spokeswoman. “It was determined that it was inert and not a risk.”
SeaBus service had to be suspended for close to four hours while TransLink set up shuttles for passengers in Vancouver and North Vancouver.
Drennan could not say whether the Walkman had a cassette in it. Most major music distributors abandoned the format in 2002. Transit police won’t be trying to track down the Walkman’s owner, she added.
The heavy response was justified, given that public transit facilities have been known to be targets for bomb plots around the world, Drennan said.
“We just had to use an abundance of caution – err on the side of safety,” she said. “We are very sorry to all of our passengers for the inconvenience. We just hope most of them will recognize we did what we had to do in order to keep them safe. It’s an unfortunate situation but these measures have to be taken from time to time.”
In November 2012, police did recover an actual homemade bomb from SkyTrain tracks in Surrey. The incident triggered a massive investigation and a spike in “suspicious package” reports that turned out to be false alarms. No suspects were ever identified, Drennan said.
“The file remains open but there were never any answers that came out of that,” she said.
The incident should be a reminder for everyone to keep their electronics close while riding transit and make sure nothing gets left behind, Drennan noted.
