Story Archive

Accordion to Procedure

An employee at Walnut Middle School in Grand Island, Neb., saw a box in the band room. It didn’t look like a band-instrument box to the employee, so the school was evacuated. The police were contacted, and the fire department responded, as did the Nebraska State Patrol — with a bomb unit and a dog. The bomb squad figured out it could open the latched box, so it did. The highly dangerous contents of the box in the band room: an accordion. It was not clear to whom it belonged, although it might actually be the school district’s accordion. The band teacher hadn’t seen the box before, schools district safety coordinator Rick Ressel said. Ressel added the middle school practices evacuating routinely, and that this evacuation took less than two minutes — maybe just one minute. Still, he said there’d be a debriefing to see whether the evacuation process can be improved. (AC/Grand Island Independent) ...When you expect terrorists and you can’t attract al-Qaeda, you scram at a hint of Weird Al.