STEILACOOM – A device that looked like a bomb but was actually a homemade toy prompted authorities to close the ferry dock here for more than four hours Thursday, a Pierce County sheriff’s spokesman said.
The device, which involved some plastic pipes taped together, was spotted jammed under a walkway leading to the dock at about 1:45 p.m.
Police used a remote-controlled robot to examine the item and determined shortly after 6 p.m. that it was not explosive, sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer said.
Nearby children apparently made the toy and lost it in the water, Troyer said. One of the children’s mothers brought her son down to the dock and he told investigators what had happened.
The toy apparently floated to the ferry dock and became stuck under the walkway, Troyer said.
With major expansions planned at two Eastern Washington prisons, the state Department of Corrections is ramping up its efforts to recruit staff.
The department plans to hire more than 1,900 employees over the next two years, including prison guards – who prefer to be called corrections officers – human resources professionals, cooks, doctors, dentists, nurses and maintenance workers.
“It’s like a small town,” said Lorna Ovena, the Corrections Department administrator in charge of the recruiting drive.
An 800-bed expansion of the state penitentiary at Walla Walla in August and a few hundred new beds at other prisons are the immediate concern, Ovena said.
After that, the system will need 512 employees to run the Coyote Ridge Corrections Center in Connell. That center, which after expanding from 600 to 2,648 beds will become the system’s largest prison, is expected to be fully occupied by July 2009.
Laurie Raye said she had everything stripped from her home after someone placed a fake ad on Craigslist, the San Francisco-based Internet site that features online classifieds.
“The instigator who published this ad invited the public to come in and vandalize me,” Raye told Seattle television station KING.
Raye had recently evicted a tenant and cleaned out the rental.
The ad posted last week welcomed people to take anything they wanted from the home – free. The ad has since been pulled from the site, but not before the residence was stripped of light fixtures, the hot water heater and the kitchen sink.
Even the front door and a vinyl window were pilfered, Raye said.
“In the ad, it said come and take what you want. Everything is free,” she said. “Please help yourself to anything on the property.”
Associated Press
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