A black bag abandoned in a field – innocuous in any other year, but just over a month after a similar bag was used to hide a bomb at the Boston Marathon, suspicious.
And for good reason: there actually is a bomb in this backpack, and the bomber, RCMP explosives technician Bill R., has his finger on the remote trigger. "Three! Two! One! Fire!" He pushes the button.
A percussive "boomph" that you feel in your feet from 35 paces away. Debris sprays. Clothes fly. Passing ants are (presumably) maimed.
Sgt. Ron C. of the RCMP steps forward, cool as ice, ready to get to work. "You always go to the seat of the explosion," he explains, as he examines the shredded backpack, and you always look for the pieces left over.
"You find DNA, you find fingerprints, and you find components you can only buy in a certain place." Piece the clues together, and you can reconstruct the bomb and find leads on the bomber.
A St. Albert resident, Ron has probably the coolest job on the planet: he blows stuff up.
A former sniper with the RCMP's national counter-terrorism unit, he's been with the force some 33 years, 13 of which he's spent on K Division's bomb squad. It's a dangerous job where a single misstep could lead to instant annihilation.
He's surprisingly laid back. "I'm not a big adrenaline guy," he says, speaking at Edmonton's K Division headquarters, and neither are his teammates. "Bomb techs don't seek the spotlight. We like to fly under the radar."
The son of a cop, Ron, 61, says he joined the force back in 1979. Starting off in the commercial crimes unit, he eventually joined the Special Emergency Response Team in Ottawa – the predecessor to the elite Canadian counter-terrorist group known as Joint Task Force Two.
Having got a bit of explosives training through the unit, Ron decided to move to St. Albert in the early 1990s and become a full time bomb-tech. Today, he's the head of K Division's explosives disposal unit, responsible for bomb disposal throughout Alberta and Nunavut.
Calling the bomb squad
An explosive is a compound full of unstable atomic bonds, Ron explains. Break those bonds with a shock, and you release energy in the form of a boom. Put the explosive inside a container, such as the pressure cookers used in Boston, add a trigger, and you get a bomb.
The squad gets about a hundred calls a year, says retired St. Albert cop and former squad member Mike Moulds, only a few of which involve actual bombs.
Some of those calls are for reconnaisance support with their disposal robots, Ron says – remote-run mini-tanks equipped with treads, claws, sensors, and (occasionally) a shotgun. It was one of their robots that first discovered the body of James Roszko during the 2005 Mayerthorpe shooting of four RCMP officers, he notes.
Many calls are to get rid of old explosives, Moulds says. "Old explosives have become very shock-sensitive," he notes, as the nitro-glycerine tends to leak out, and even a strong bump can set them off.
And if it's too heavy for the robot to handle, Ron says, it's up to guys like him to go in and carry it out. These are, by far, the most dangerous moments of the job, as one wrong move means an explosive end for you. "Half the time you wouldn't even wear the bomb-suit because there'd be nothing left of you. You're going to be vapour."
So what does he do when he has to carry a 50-pound crate of unstable ordinance (as he has in the past)? "I'm just very careful," he says.
The rest of the calls deal with suspicious packages. "Ninety per cent of these things are hoaxes," Ron says, ranging in complexity from devices full of wires, lights and tubes to a thermos with the word "bomb" written on it. He's only seen a handful of real bombs in Alberta.
The first thing the bomb squad does is to send in the sniffer dog, Ron says. If the dog sniffs out explosives, it will signal so by sitting down.
Next, the team will x-ray the package to see what's in it, scan for signs of chemical, biological, or radiation threats, and then make a plan of action. "You never rush a bomb call because time's on your side," Moulds says – the bomb usually isn't going anywhere.
The team tries to do as much work remotely as possible using robots or wire rigs so as not to be near the package if it goes off.
Up-close work involves the bomb suit, explains Bill, who works with Ron. The four-piece ensemble weighs about 100 pounds and is made of inch-thick Kevlar and armoured plates.
"Every bit of your body is completely protected except for your hands," Bill says. (There are gloves, but they're too cumbersome to use.)
It's hot, stiff, top-heavy, dark and claustrophobic – one of the tests for joining the squad is seeing if you can wear it without freaking out, Ron notes.
"When you're in it, you're in it for a long time," Bill says. "I've personally been in it for over three hours."
(Not) cutting the wire
The squad almost never tries to disarm bombs unless they're physically strapped to someone, Bill says. "When it comes to 'cutting the red wire,' we don't," he says, referring to pop-culture's depiction of bomb disposal.
That's because the safest and most effective way to neutralize a bomb is to blow it up. Shred a bomb's components, and it won't explode.
The team usually does this with disruptors, Bill says – essentially water bombs and cannons. Using an explosive charge, the team can shoot a column of water down a metal tube at a package to rip it apart without exploding it. Bottles of water with explosives inside them have a similar effect.
Older ordinance is vaporized through liberal application of high-powered explosives at a disposal site, such as the one in Strathcona County. You want to be absolutely certain that you get it all, Moulds says, lest you scatter undetonated explosives all over the field.
You can also burn it very, very carefully, he continues – a slow reaction means a slow release of energy, and no catastrophic boom. Dynamite burns a very brilliant orange, he adds.
The squad also gets called in to investigate after bombs have gone off as they did near Beaverlodge in 1999, Moulds says.
Here, the squad's job is to reconstruct the bomb from the pieces left over. "People think that when a bomb goes off it's just obliterated," Moulds says, "but it isn't." Wires, shrapnel, power supplies and even whole detonators can be left over, much of which can be traced back to their original buyers. "It's almost like finding the gun from a homicide."
Police found big bits of pressure cooker after the Boston bombing, Ron notes as an example. This told them the rough design of the bomb and that it contained low-powered explosives – high-explosives would have shredded the lid.
Being a bomb tech is actually a reasonably safe job when it comes to policing, Moulds says. "The guys working on the street have a more dangerous time than I did," he says – a bomb won't pull a gun on you during a traffic stop, for example.
You don't do this type of work unless you think you have the training to do it, Ron says. "It's no different than being in a fire-fight."
Except with EXPLOSIONS! "Men have a fascination with explosions," Ron says, and he blew up his fair share of models with firecrackers as a lad. Bomb disposal is dangerous work, but it's a thrill when it goes right.
"The motto of the bomb techs is we don't roll a wheel unless we're going to blow something up," he jokes.
And you get to play with high-tech robots all day, Bill says. "I'd say every day one of us looks at the other and says, 'Who has more fun than us?' "
It's a great feeling when you're on the other side of the firing-button during a safe, controlled blast, Moulds says. "It's pretty cool, believe me."
