Port of Miami security false alarms: two in two days

Two days in a row blaring headlines trumpeted possible terrorist activity at the Port of Miami, yet each case turned out to be much ado about nothing.

The cause of the first case? "Just miscommunication," say the authorities. And the cause of the second? A box of garden-variety sprinkler-system parts misidentified as plastic explosive by an electronic sensor.

On Sunday morning a man driving a tractor-trailer into the port, which handles cargo as well as cruise passengers, aroused suspicion when due to a language barrier, authorities thought he said he was alone, when in fact there were two other men with him. Did we mention that two of these men were Iraqi, and one was Lebanese?

In the end it turned out that the three are in the country quite legally and proceedings against them have been dismissed, but in the meanwhile the FBI, Immigration, Customs, Coast Guard, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement were all alerted. Authorities peeked inside the trio's container using a high-tech device and concluded it contained what the manifest said it did: car parts. End of story.

Monday, a pallet bound for Royal Caribbean's Majesty of the Seas triggered a plastic explosives alert after being tested by an electronic device. The ship was evacuated, the suspect box was taken away and blown up by authorities, but in the end this too was a false alarm. The sprinkler-system parts in the box had meant no harm to anyone.

Given that we're all 46 times more likely to drop dead as a result of falling down than from a terrorist attack, according to Wired, we really wish that cooler heads would prevail at mainstream media outlets to wait for confirmation of suspected security risks like these--before going crazy scaring everybody with "terrorist alerts" as the press did this week with these incidents.