A conversation with an old friend the other day reminded me of an incident we weathered some 30 years ago.
Our first indication of trouble was when one of our crew was asked to leave one of our client facilities late at night: seems the police were evacuating the entire neighborhood; a warehouse facility a few blocks had exploded. Found out the next morning that the exploded warehouse facility was another of our clients....
I'd just about absorbed that information when several serious looking fellows from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (they also do explosives) appeared at our office door. They were investigating the incident as an "inside job" (this was before "terrorist incidents" became the norm) and wanted information on our janitorial crew, given that they (and we) had keys to the office end of the facility, and could have gotten themselves into the warehouse, which housed various fertilizers, pool cleaning chemicals, and other such. Fortunately, even back then we performed extensive background investigations of all our folks, and we were more than happy to share the information with the fellows in the three piece suits.
Didn't hear anything back from the Feds (something of a relief), but did learn second hand that the explosion was caused by the combining, in specific proportions, of chemicals in a way that would have taken advanced study of chemistry to figure out, not to mention detailed knowledge of the whereabouts of those chemicals in the warehouse. Not our profile; much more likely a disgruntled former employee of the client.
Heard later on that they'd caught the guy; not us.
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