FBI investigating ‘vehicle explosion’ at Rainbow Bridge on US-Canadian border | CNN
the latest from cnn is that the car accelerated as it approached the bridge, went airborne and crashed into the secondary search area. and came apart in a spectacular way.
Do you think the state and federal reactions to today’s Rainbow Bridge explosion strongly allude to a suspected cause or are general cautions for a holiday week?
How about some context.
ETA, found this, haven’t read it yet but skimming it suggests the possibility of a car bomb.
The few random pictures I can find have me guessing this is going to be a terrorist thing.
Cars do not randomly explode. This has “bombing plot went awry” all over it. Pictures show debris scattered over a wide area that appear to be consistent with a bomb, not some sort of vehicle failure like a burst gas tank.
For those reading the stories who might be unfamiliar with US-Canada border procedures, the people in the car had been diverted to secondary inspection. Basically, when you drive up to the border, you rarely do that. You present your passport to the officer, they have a look, ask questions as to why you are coming into USA/Canada today and how long you plan to stay, and unless
A) You have something special going on, like something to declare, or you’re staying a long time or something, or
B) They are suspicious of you,
you’re on your way. So I think maybe condition B might have popped up and someone panicked. But we will find out.
Conversely, it would be a very weird bombing plot that had someone building a live bomb in Canada, and then trying to cross the border with it at Niagara Falls, of all places.
I hope that:
a) nobody was hurt
b) if this was a bomb, we find out quickly the who and why of it.
I have to admit, when I first saw the thread, my mind went to “rainbow bridge” as in the place pets cross when they die and go to heaven…
That’s where the Discourse search engine went, too. It was harder to combine the two threads than it usually is. 
Uh, yeah, I combined two similar threads. This seems a better fit for “breaking news” in MPSIMS than for IMHO.
The passenger and driver were killed. According to CNN.
My initial thought too. In my defense, I’m a lifelong pet owner and have never been anywhere near Niagara Falls, so had no idea the real-life bridge even existed.
Thanks, @puzzlegal . I had thought about reporting two threads on the same subject, but since they were in different categories…
There’s more than one, actually – there’s an historic concrete arch bridge with that name in the town where I live as well, so the story presented a different kind of confusion for me.
I suspect it would be easier to build a bomb in Canada, due to our overall lesser amount of policing in general. As for the bridge, the target would depend a lot on who built the bomb, but as a symbol for lasting friendship between well-known democracies, striking this bridge in particular would be a powerful message, for at least some groups out there. There are a lot of people in the world who are heavily invested in proving that democracies don’t work.
Now I’ve seen an eyewitness report that the car was moving towards CANADA, was moving at extremely high speed and struck something and blew up.
Sounds more like the attack (if indeed it was an attack) was aimed at the customs infrastructure and officers, not at the bridge itself.
For damned sure, impacting a modern anti-ramming barrier at high speed will pretty well turn a car into a blob that doesn’t even need to be crushed at the junkyard; it’s already been done.
FYI wiki lists around 10 bridges named or nicknamed “the rainbow bridge”. Seems to be a common moniker for any fairly flat arch bridge: Rainbow Bridge - Wikipedia.
Same here. Then I went looking for a Far Side cartoon that would fit.
No, no, no! It’s where the Valkyries lead the souls of warriors to Asgard!
Does anyone else wonder if the Rainbow Bridge was targeted because of its name?
I’ve been across that bridge a few times. It’s name comes from the fact that it’s a great place to see the rainbow that always forms above the Falls on a sunny day, and I can attest that it is. That’s all that the name is about.
I guess not everybody would know that, however.
Well, the 2 people who were in the car are confirmed dead. I guess it took them some time to pick up the bits.
Video at the link.
Watching CNN on this right now. They’re stopping short of calling it terrorist-related—they don’t know what caused it: perhaps the driver suffered a medical emergency, such as a heart attack, for example. However, a Canadian news source says: