Better to err on the side of caution

There are a dozen disasters a day averted because someone cared enough to look twice at something.

We've had a couple of busy Sundays, with the Tahoe-Douglas Bomb Squad called out Sunday for an incident in Chichester Estates and the week before when a large box was left in the middle of the street in the Gardnerville Ranchos.

No one would argue calling out the cavalry when they found a grenade in the front yard as the odor of gasoline and kerosene wafted through the air.

But then again, people aren't in the habit of leaving stray boxes in the middle of the road in this part of the country. So someone got suspicious and called the authorities.

On Sunday, the grenade turned out to be inert, but a lit match could have burned the house to the ground. The box in the middle of the road the week before turned out to be full of children's clothes and toys, and some folks had a chuckle at the authority's expense thanks to their ability to look back on the whole story.

But had it been full of something less benign, that chuckle would turn into a gasp. And sitting in the moment there's no way to know what's in the box without opening it.

We're not paying our emergency responders by the incident. We would much rather have them respond first and ask questions later, than find out the hard way that something required their attention.