“IED” detonates at Montana elementary school - no injuries

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Rossiter Elementary School in the Helena Valley was evacuated Tuesday morning after a detonated explosive device, which authorities describe as a soda bottle wrapped in duct tape, was found on the school playground.

No injuries were reported, and Lewis and Clark County Sheriff Leo Dutton said he is not aware of any property damage caused by the explosion.

Officials said Rossiter staff called 911 at 8:21 a.m. to report the device. School staff used cones to keep students away from the device, which had exploded before it was found.

"We don't know what time this thing exploded," Grimmis said. "But what I do know is it did not explode while there was students there, while there was faculty there, which is a good sign."

Rossiter school canceled classes for the rest of the day Tuesday. The parents of Rossiter students were asked to pick up their kids at the Little Red Schoolhouse east of the school and east of the Frontage Road.

All other schools in Helena and East Helena were placed on lock-down and were temporarily searched by law enforcement.

"Our intentions are to make the schools as safe as possible," Grimmis said.

All Helena District 1 and East Helena schools were swept and cleared by about 11:30 a.m., and lock downs have been lifted. Rossiter is closed for the day. The status for school tomorrow at Rossiter is yet to be determined.

Officials in Broadwater, Jefferson and Cascade counties were also checking schools and monitoring the situation Tuesday.

Authorities are also sweeping the state Capitol and other state buildings.

"We're going through it methodically and slowly so we don't miss something," Dutton said.

Officials have not yet identified where the explosive device came from. The Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Office and its bomb squad, the FBI, the Montana Highway Patrol, the Helena Police Department, and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are on the scene.

"We want our bosses, the public, to know that things are under control, nobody was hurt, we are taking appropriate precautions," Dutton said.

We had M-80’s, firecrackers, smoke bombs go off on occasion in the hallways in high school in the early ‘70s. Different era, classes were not cancelled and the whole town did not go on lockdown. Lockdown was not a concept. Either we were not snowflakes or naively stupid.

Almost like mass shootings and terrorism weren't nearly as common back in the early 70s. Norms change with the times and with the circumstances.

Detonating even the simplest pipe bomb, whether the work of some fringe militant group or a Unabomber-like kook, can draw the attentions of literally hundreds of journalists, photographers and law-enforcement personnel,

It may be hard to recall now, but there was a time when most Americans were decidedly more blasé about bombing attacks. This was during the 1970s, when protest bombings in America were commonplace, especially in hard-hit cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Nearly a dozen radical underground groups, dimly remembered outfits such as the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front and the Symbionese Liberation Army, set off hundreds of bombs during that tumultuous decade—so many, in fact, that many people all but accepted them as a part of daily life. As one woman sniffed to a New York Post reporter after an attack by a Puerto Rican independence group in 1977: “Oh, another bombing? Who is it this time?’”

The underground groups of the 1970s were a kind of grungy, bell-bottomed coda to the protests of the 1960s; their members were mostly onetime student leftists who refused to give up the utopian dreams of 1968.

In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day. Because they were typically detonated late at night, few caused serious injury, leading to a kind of grudging public acceptance. The deadliest underground attack of the decade, in fact, killed all of four people, in the January 1975 bombing of a Wall Street restaurant. News accounts rarely carried any expression or indication of public outrage.

Consider what happened when another Puerto Rican group detonated a small bomb in a Bronx cinema while a rapt crowd watched a movie called The Liberation of L.B. Jones. When police ordered everyone to leave, an NYPD spokesman complained, the audience angry refused, demanding to see the rest of the movie. When police insisted, “They about tore the place apart.”

A "soda bottle" "IED" that contained ... what? A firecracker? Alka-seltzer? The reporting in these stories is pathetic.

Random mass shootings were not common, terrorism was.
The Bombings of America That We Forgot

Montana authorities say a device they initially thought to be the remnants of a homemade bomb in an elementary school playground didn't explode — and it wasn't even a bomb.

Lewis and Clark County Sheriff Leo Dutton said Tuesday that further investigation found the plastic bottle wrapped in black tape was full of washers, nuts and bolts, along with a non-flammable unidentified liquid. There was no detonator attached to the bottle.

Dutton says a homeless person carried the bottle from a nearby construction site and left it in Helena's Rossiter Elementary School playground.

Initially, authorities said the bottle was an improvised explosive device that detonated sometime before school began. Dutton says authorities passed on information they believed to be true at the time, and that school officials acted appropriately.

As you said you can never be sure but I do not have a doubt that 9/11 would have been a massively traumatizing game changer had it occurred in the 70s. There has been no terrorist attack remotely as lethal and it was the most deaths on via hostile act on American soil since the civil war.