On Thursday, Oct. 25, 1979, a bomb threat made towards the Dow Chemical Plant in Fort Saskatchewan caused then-Sturgeon County Reeve Bill Flynn, and probably everybody else, to have a hectic afternoon.
A Gazette article about the event states that Flynn “was forced to dust off his Emergency Measures manual” in response to the bomb threat that never materialized.
“For almost 45 minutes the Reeve divided his time between consultations with Morinville RCMP and calls to the emergency measures coordinator in Fort Saskatchewan, while also trying to maintain a quorum at the regular ... council meeting,” the article reads. “The bomb, scheduled to go off at 3:30 p.m. never did explode.”
“But council did experience a few anxious moments when it realized that if the bomb did go off, hundreds of people would have to be evacuated from Bon Accord and Gibbons.”
“With the emergency over, Reeve Flynn and council returned to handling the less explosive issues on the agenda.”
Past issues of the Gazette, dating as far back as Jan. 1, 1949, are available to view online thanks to the University of Alberta's Peel's Prairie Provinces archive.
