By Alice Collinsworth
CNHI News Service
EDMOND — It wasn’t a good day for geocacher Diane Surtees when friends told her the police were looking for her.
Surtees is hardly the type to plant an incendiary device, but her “Chicken Lips” Geocaching package — made from a paintball tube, wrapped in camouflage tape and attached to a tree — looked like a pipe bomb to a passerby, who called police.
The point of geocaching is to hide small containers in public places. The packages, containing a log book and trinkets, are given catchy names and listed on Web sites for other players to find, using hand-held global positioning systems.
Chicken Lips, one of about 100 caches in Edmond, was hidden near a church and a school, adding to the finder’s suspicions. Bomb squad technicians rushed to the scene, and the package was eventually blown apart. Inside, officers found a spiral notebook, plastic toys, an Oklahoma rose rock and a card identifying Surtees’ caching name, “Okie Rose Rocks.”
But two explosives technicians, four patrol officers and one supervisor had spent at least 90 minutes at the Chicken Lips scene, along with the bomb squad’s investigative robot. Sgt. Scott Fees, supervisor of the Edmond Police Department bomb squad, estimated the cost in man hours and expenses at $800.
Fees later attempted to contact Surtees through a geocaching Web site, and other cachers called her to tell her the police were looking for her.
“My husband said, ‘Remember, all you did was hide a container of toys in a park,’” she said.
But to Fees and other investigators across the country, it’s not quite that simple. Fees spoke about the problem to about 40 members of the Central Oklahoma Geocachers on June 10.
“When we get a call, we have to act in accordance with the information we receive,” Fees told the group. “An item that’s called in as a pipe bomb gets investigated as a pipe bomb.”
Chicken Lips was the second geocache incident in Edmond in the past year, Fees said.
The sport’s popularity is increasing rapidly nationwide, but law enforcement officers aren’t entirely happy with the trend.
Fees said a paintball container like Chicken Lips potentially could have held a block of C-4, more dangerous in explosive weight than a military hand grenade.
Capt. J.D. Wilson of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol said he knows of at least three caches investigated by OHP bomb technicians in the past two years.
“They did look like pipe bombs,” he said of the items. “They were made of PVC pipe with end caps, and either painted neutral colors or camouflaged.”
The OHP bomb squad is called to cities across the state, so travel time becomes an expensive factor.
Geocachers are loosely organized and are asked to follow safety considerations published on Web sites. Participants generally follow the guidelines, Fees said, but people unfamiliar with the sport often don’t recognize a cache when they see it.
Fees advised the local geocachers to play responsibly and give careful consideration to the appearance and location of their containers. He suggested searching for already-established landmarks or monuments instead of hidden packages.
He also recommended the use of clear plastic packages, easily examined by passersby and police.
But Fees said no matter how carefully a cache is designed, there’s always the possibility it could contain a bomb.
“What does a bomb look like?” he said. “A lot of (bomb calls) we go on are things that are packaged suspiciously and inconspicuously, just like these devices.”
With the increasing popularity of geocaching, Fees said he fears the situation will grow worse for law enforcement officers. Nevertheless, he appreciates the appeal of the sport.
“I think it’s a neat deal,” he told the geocaching group. “The more I find out about it, the more my perspective on the whole thing changes.”
Alice Collinsworth writes for The Edmond Sun.
