Trouble in Mayberry

I rely on the local DPS (our combo police, fire & ambulance department) to protect my home and property. So I hate to think they've only got one bullet for their gun, and are required to keep it in their shirt pocket so no one gets hurt, but I wonder.

Nothing wrong with a bit of Mayberry, for the record. After living in a seedy neighborhood in KC's Old Northeast for a few years, it was refreshing to not hear gunshots in the night on a weekly basis or have to swerve to avoid stoned prostitutes stumbling into the main drag at night. Right after we moved here, my then wife and I opened a checking account, received an offer from the bank employee to hook us up with her oldest daughter for baby-sitting and left the bank to realize we had just opened a checking account without being asked for ID.



We could have been anyone, really. But since we were claiming an address in town, we were neighbors, and who would suspect her neighbor?



The town has grown a lot since then, but it still has a lot of small town to it.



So after work I went to my chiropractor, and after that, I tried to go home but there were emergency vehicles blocking the Viaduct. I use a capital V because it's just a bridge, but locals call it 'The Viaduct' as if it were the only one of its kind. Which I guess it is if you've never been outside our little town.

There were fire trucks around the base of it, and a cop car up on top. A cop and someone in a bright green city employee T-Shirt were up on the bridge. I thought jumper, but it's only about a 25 foot drop; unless you timed it with a train it would be hard to kill yourself jumping off this bridge. And if you were threatening to jump, I can't see a uniformed officer just hanging out with you.



I saw what appeared to be a propane tank from a gas grill laying against a wall on the bridge, but the two men didn't seem to be paying it any mind.

Then the Hazmat truck showed up from a neighboring town and I went around the long way to get home.

Then, taking my car to the garage for what will hopefully be the last time over the window not going up and down, I found the road was blocked even further from the Viaduct. The cop let me through since I was taking my car to a garage directly under the bridge and walking back. So whatever had the bridge shut down wasn't anything that dangerous, right?

While I was at the garage, a couple of other people had walked down and were badmouthing the DPS and speculating on an entirely Hank Hill level about what was on the bridge. A guy flew over in an ultralight, and one of them said how he'd heard they were trying to pass a law about 'those things' because one had crashed into a house somewhere.



I said, One of those crashes into your house, it might break a window if it hits it straight on. There are go-carts with more substance to them.

Undeterred he went on to talk about how if there was a problem with a cart, he heard you could jettison it and still have the parachute. Which makes since until you try to imagine what would make you need to drop the cart. If it looses power, you glide down and land. If it wasn't enough parachute for you and the cart, you'd never get up there in the first place.

So the guy went back to badmouthing the DPS bragging about what hell he'd given them when they hassled him over an out of state 30 day tag on a car he'd brought back from Arizona.



I left Dale and Boomhauer to their musings.

On the walk back, I asked the cop manning the road block what the story was, and he said a propane tank had fallen off a vehicle.

Okay. So pick it up.

My Dad came down so I could borrow his car while mine's in the shop and after I had dropped him, I went through Wal-Mart and bought too many groceries (never shop hungry or tired, right? I was both) and headed home. Surely the Viaduct would be open now. It had been four hours since the cops first showed up and shut it down.

Now there was a news van, a few more emergency vehicles including one towing what appears to be a large, red smoker. But since I'm pretty sure the Olathe Fire Department didn't come down to make burnt ends at the foot of our little bridge, I'm pretty sure it was a bomb can. Or whatever you call those things they detonate bombs in.

But the Sheriff's Deputy I asked told me it was a gas leak, and when I said I thought it was an awful small can to leak for four hours, he said 'They're just telling us it's a propane tank.'

You could tell he didn't believe it. He was weary of the lie but if he knew what it really was he'd been told in no uncertain terms not to share this with the endless stream of locals.

I guess the fear is we might panic. Better to think our hee-haw Department of Public Safety would shut down a bridge for hours on end without good reason than think of a genuine threat.



After negotiating my way around, town again, I asked the cop manning the road block on the other side, a different cop from the one who'd let me through to my mechanic, and he said they're still insisting it's a propane tank. He also allowed that he was tired of sitting there and hoped that whatever it was would be taken care of straight away.

Wonder what they'd do with a real situation. Then again, they just gave me a way better angle for a major plot element of the novel I haven't worked on much the past couple years...

Postscript

I finally (after lengthy searching) found an incredibly short article about the incident featuring guys in protective gear picking up what turned out to be a tank of anhydrous ammonia.

Which was probably dropped off some mobile meth lab. Gotta love the war on drugs sometimes. It's never kept anyone from getting high, but it keeps the addicts busy. How boring if they could just go buy commercially made amphetamines and blow their brains up without burning down their trailer (and endangering firefighters and their neighbors in the process) or shutting down a bridge in a medium size town for half a day while local law enforcement agencies prove themselves to be a bunch of boobs.