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Former Winona resident Anne Jefferson, now an Oregon State University researcher, simply forgot about the small temperature monitoring devices that she’d packed in a rental car trunk.
The devices, which Jefferson had used in her study of a stream near St. Anthony Falls, admittedly looked suspicious, in a bomby sort of way. They were constructed with PVC piping and had holes drilled in them. They were filled with gravel and had blinking green lights.
On Thursday, while visiting family in Minnesota, Jefferson, 27, wedged the devices in the spare tire well to prevent gravel from spilling.
Sunday morning, Jefferson and her husband drove to the Twin Cities airport, their luggage in the back seat. The temperature loggers with nearly half a year’s research stored in them were in the trunk. Out of sight, out of mind.
They dropped the car off and went to catch their flight.
Minutes later, an Avis car cleaner noticed the PVC pipes with the blinking lights and called the FBI. That led authorities to shut down part of the airport and call a Bloomington Police bomb squad to blow up the devices.
Meanwhile, the 1997 Winona Senior High graduate and her husband boarded a plane bound for Portland, Ore.
When the plane landed, the gate agent paged Jefferson’s husband. At first, Jefferson thought there might be a family emergency. Stuck near the back of the plane, they waited.
The gate agent paged him again, this time with more urgency.
“She sounded a bit more insistent,” Jefferson said. “By the second time, something triggered my memory and I remembered we left the equipment in the rental car. I thought, ‘Even if that’s not what this is about, we need to call Avis immediately.’”
Portland police met the couple at the gate and asked them if they knew what this was about. Jefferson guessed the scientific equipment.
The police escorted Jefferson and her husband to an empty gate area where they waited for an FBI agent. When the agent arrived, Jefferson told him about the research and the instrument.
“I told him about the research. Actually, he was reasonably pleasant and a former geologist, so he had some sympathy,” Jefferson said.
She then learned the bomb squad had possibly annihilated the research in the name of airport security.
“It was pretty devastating,” Jefferson said. “It’s not the sort of thing a scientist wants to hear.”
However, when she spoke with the police, they said a few of the devices still had blinking green lights, meaning they could still be operational.
“This science is fairly high-tech, the equipment housing the devices are low-tech,” Jefferson said. “(Some of the parts) were a dog tether I got at a Petco store. Most of them were built with materials from Home Depot.”
Jefferson doesn’t fault the airport security for being concerned. After all, when she journeyed from Oregon State to St. Anthony Fall, she flew with the devices disassembled into component parts and left notes in her luggage explaining that she was a researcher carrying scientific equipment.
Her only regret is that someone didn’t contact them before they left the airport. According to police reports, the device was discovered more than an hour before they left.
“Maybe it could have been avoided,” Jefferson said. “I do feel bad about police and travelers being inconvenienced. That couldn’t have been any fun.”
Police told Jefferson they use a water pressure detonation technique.
“They are built waterproof and built to withstand water pressure,” Jefferson said, holding out hope that her data may have survived despite police efforts to destroy the device.
For now, she’ll wait to see if any data is available — including a possible reading taken as the police tried to destroy the devices.
