Under One Roof: How a Tough Old Woman in a Little Old House Changed My Life

Within minutes, two police cars showed up. They were treating the whole incident pretty nonchalantly until they saw the thing, at which point their demeanor became all business. They called the bomb squad from their cell phones, because they didn’t want to put it out over the radio and give the media a chance to get wind of it and panic everybody. I noticed that one of the workers on the site – one of the environmental guys who worked for the owner – was still at his post. “Excuse me,” I said to him. “What part of ‘this could be a bomb and it could blow up’ did you not understand?” He got up and, with a big sigh, slowly walked away.

Ten minutes later, the bomb squad, the FBI, and a bunch more police cars were on the scene, along with my bosses from Ledcor. We watched from the street as officers swarmed all over the site. I went up to the guy at the big black bomb squad truck parked on the street, and asked him if he’d like me to open a gate so he could pull the truck onto the site. “No, I got a million bucks’ worth of equipment on here,” he said. “Anything blows up, I can’t take a chance.”

I looked over at all the cops.

“Well, there sure are a lot of guys standing around the thing,” I said. “Are they okay to be there?”

“We lose those officers,” he deadpanned, “we can get new ones. But this equipment is hard to replace.”

Just then, the guy who had been so reluctant to take this seriously was striding up to me. He seemed to think it was his job to read me the riot act: he was “officially putting me on notice” that Ledcor was responsible for this site. He started grilling me about why we weren’t securing the perimeter, and telling me that the safety of everyone was our responsibility. He was just ranting. I tried to calm him down a few times, and point out that the police had the scene under control, but the more I tried to reassure him, the wilder his ranting got. Finally, I put one hand on his collar, grabbed his arm with the other, and escorted him off the premises. The cops looked over and didn’t bat an eye, except for one who I swear was trying to stifle a big grin.