TACOMA — A rumor of a cargo jet crashing into military housing was quickly spread on a popular Facebook page at Joint Base Lewis-McChord just a month after a helicopter crash killed four Army aviators near the base.
The Tacoma News Tribune reports that someone wrote on a garrison Facebook page that a C-17 Globemaster IIIs plane had crashed Thursday.
Base spokesman J.C. Mathews squashed the rumor just after he saw it, but it had already caught the attention of two TV stations and spread to the Facebook pages used by other Army units at Lewis-McChord.
Mathews says the person who wrote the original post will not be reprimanded because the person thought a crash had occurred.
The Air Force was not even flying C-17s out of McChord that night.
Many people in the base were using Facebook to get updates on the winter storm that was pummeling the region.
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