William Stewart [mailto:william.stewart@usask.ca]
Just my $0.0126 worth (Canadian) :-)
......well if we're going to involve Canadians :-) here is my opinion:
Why did "Police closed off three miles of Route 9 and evacuated more than 100 residents"?
It might just be the compounding effect - like you see sometimes in engineering -- one guy puts a 2x safety factor on some design, then some other guy down the line puts his 2x safety factor, and so on, until you end up with some ridiculous design with a 100x safety factor.
In this case, its possible the police took the Emergency Response Team's 100m distance & applied their own 10x additional "safety factor."
This wouldn't surprise me at all - having observed on numerous occasions how the cops love to play big shots & block traffic unnecessarily - for instance, blocking two out of three lanes on a highway, due to a minor accident, when one lane (plus the shoulder) would have been enough.... anything with a "radioactive" label on it would no doubt be automatically considered as plenty enough excuse to cause havoc across half the state. It may not necessarily have been the ER Team's fault, is what I'm getting at....
Jaro