B.C. bomb scare not trucker-terrorist, just errorist

VANCOUVER – Phew! Crisis averted. It wasn’t a truck bomb so much as a clerical error.

That’s how officials in Vancouver must have felt last week when they learned that two one-tonne sacks of the same material used in the first World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings were not actually missing, despite reports to the contrary.

The material in question is highly explosive ammonium nitrate. A couple of tonnes could do very serious damage.

And in December, according to local media reports, Vancouver pipeline company Kinder Morgan conducted an audit and reported to the RCMP that the bags — part of a six-bag shipment — supposed to be in a Surrey, B.C., storage facility, couldn’t be accounted for.

The Mounties investigated and reported that instead of a dangerous theft, there had been a clerical error and the explosive was in fact in the right place all along.

But somebody in the supply chain, consisting of Kinder Morgan, an unidentified trucker and the owner of the ammonium nitrate, apparently goofed, so the stuff virtually disappeared off the books for a while.

It was in Surrey, en route from Alberta to British Columbia to be used in a mining operation.

Still, it had a lot of people pretty worried for a few while. Especially with the Olympics just around the corner.

Officials are still looking into how the error happened.