It’s seems like the thing to do these days is call in a bomb threat to some institution. Everybody dutifully files out of the building until it’s been determined (how?) that there is no bomb. Has there ever been a bomb? Has evacuating the premises ever saved any lives?
Olympic Park Bomber (presumably) “warned” ahead of time.
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/terrorists_spies/terrorists/eric_rudolph/1.html
Not sure he was actually trying to save people or not. He may have been trying to balance not killing people with having his bomb actually go off, but I don’t know. Killed two people (one by heart attack).
FWIW - he claims he was trying to save non government people…
If a “bomb threat” has an actual bomb, it is not a bomb threat anymore. It is a bomb warning.
ISTR that the IRA usually called the locations they were bombing.
As did the Irgun. Notably, there was a great deal of dispute between the Irgun and the British government on the timing of warnings preceding the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed 91 people.
Harvey’s Resort Hotel bombing, Stateline, Nevada, August 1980.
Wow. Just looking at that Wikipedia article and the FBI page cited as one of its sources, what an interesting story.
The bomb was built by a millionaire ex-Nazi Luftwaffe pilot gambling addict to extort $3 million dollars from a casino. It was one of the largest, and remains the most complex, home-made bombs ever studied, containing eight triggering mechanisms, three timers, and considered impossible even for its creator to fully disarm.
What a strange story, it’s like a movie (or maybe it’s more correct to say, “movies have borrowed parts of this story.”)
Famously, the 1996 bombing of Manchester. Police received a one-hour warning, giving time to evaucate folks.
It also gave time for news organizations to get cameras in place.
Two law enforcement people were killed in 2008 and one severely injured when investigating a bomb threat near Portland, OR. They found a box they thought was a fake, and it exploded when one was trying to open it.
The IRA generally contacted local police and occasionally media, rather than the locations themselves.
Warnings were phoned in before the King David Hotelbombing, and ignored. The Mad Bombergave warning of his attacks. The Weather Undergroundgave a 6 minute warning before one of their bombs went off at a police station.
The student radicals who committed the University of Wisconsin bombing in 1970 called the policeshortly before the bomb went off, but a researcher in the building was killed anyway.
I was interested to see that one of the four bombers is still at large.