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Reportedly, there was a visible countdown timer on the vehicle that exploded, and an audible warning played for 15-20 minutes prior to the blast: https://www.y

Reportedly, there was a visible countdown timer on the vehicle that exploded, and an audible warning played for 15-20 minutes prior to the blast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU

drtillberg 6y ago
Local TV News managed to interview a neighbor from directly across the street where the explosion occurred[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iag6cTWpgq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iag6cTWpgq8
- orblivion 6y ago
  Interesting things to consider. 1) I heard something about "fake reports" about gunshots. But maybe the perp shot off some guns just to get the cops to show up? 2) This woman stuck around for 15 minutes or a half hour while this thing was saying "you need to evacuate, this has a bomb"??? 3) This woman recalls a male voice but the news played a female voice. This goes to show how bad our memories are!
  - macintux 6y ago
    > This woman stuck around for 15 minutes or a half hour while this thing was saying "you need to evacuate, this has a bomb"??? Watching a video, the audio was so surreal I had to ask myself how I would respond if I heard that without any clue where it was coming from. Hopefully I never find out, but I guess now I'm a bit more mentally prepared to not linger.
  - resonantjacket5 6y ago
    There were gunshots sounds but we're not sure if it was audio from the RV or actual gun shots
    - orblivion 6y ago
      This makes for such a fascinating story. Supervillain type stuff. Except fortunately in this case a supervillian with some sort of code of ethics.
      - sillysaurusx 6y ago
        Let's not idolize crazy. Fascinating, yes. But supervillains have redeeming qualities. There's nothing redeeming about a car bomb.
        ALittleLight 6y ago
        Well playing a warning and picking a time and place to minimize casualties is some kind of redeeming. It would certainly be worse if they tried to kill people, picking a crowded place and time.
        sillysaurusx 6y ago
        I guess. I'm just sad I lived to see a second legit terrorist attack on American soil. I remember being in 8th grade when sept11 happened.
        ALittleLight 6y ago
        I think there have been several attacks of this magnitude or worse since September 11. e.g. The Boston Marathon bombing or the anthrax attacks, or Christopher Dorner (though maybe that's less terrorist and more revenge). There have been lots. I think, so long as this wasn't a test run for a coordinated attack on the telecoms, then this is not a very bad terrorist attack.
        sillysaurusx 6y ago
        Yeah, that’s a good point. I forgot entirely about the Boston marathon bombing. And in comparison, that one was indeed much worse... my Airbnb host at the time was participating in the race, and almost got caught in the explosion. Hmm. Well, it will be interesting to see whatever motivated this bombing.
  - astura 6y ago
    > I heard something about "fake reports" about gunshots. But maybe the perp shot off some guns just to get the cops to show up? Reports of gunshots weren't fake because multiple witnesses heard gunshots. No idea if it was related to the bombing or not. Example: https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/25/us/nashville-explosion/index.html?fbclid=IwAR2eobyKNLHiZ1eLupyVr7U-3qmwgXkgG2cjbXehvzpozfETlLTR28EZ7RY https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/25/us/nashville-explosion/index.... >McCoy said he was originally woken up by what he believed were gunshots prior to the explosion. He got up and looked out the window, he said, but went back to bed when he didn't see anything. Asked if the noise he heard could have been something other than gunfire, McCoy emphasized that he believed it was, saying he owns a gun and goes shooting, so he's familiar with the sound of gunshots.
    - partiallypro 6y ago
      The prevailing theory is that there were no gun shots, but gun shots were played over the speakers to wake people up so they would evacuate.
      - Throwaway1771 6y ago
        Why ammo in RV then?
        bigbubba 6y ago
        Perhaps the RV was stolen from an American.
  - js2 6y ago
    Re 3, here's some more examples: "How Many of Your Memories Are Fake?" https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/how-many-of-your-memories-are-fake/281558/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/how-many-... "Reliability of Eyewitness Reports to a Major Aviation Accident": https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=ijaaa https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&co...
  - doctorshady 6y ago
    Maybe she was right, and there were two voices? The female announcement sounds like it was edited. Badly. This might explain the strange verbiage as well ("All buildings" stands out. That particularly phrase, with its inflection, sounds like it originally came from the end of a sentence too). I've heard other people say it sounds like the same voice used by the city during the summer protests or something along those lines. For the purposes of arguing, let's say someone got ahold of some municipal evacuation recordings and chopped them up for this. It's not likely they had enough phrases to warn people a bomb would be going off in specifically fifteen minutes. EDIT: For anyone curious about other instances of bad edits, listen to the word "this"; there's another word before that, and it was cut off: "thi-this area must be evacuated now". Also, "if you can hear this message, <unnatural pause> evacuate now." It's not likely any professional voiceover person would announce this way, nor would anyone who's paid attention to basic edits before consider this passable. If this is all true, I guess the next question to ask is who would have access to those announcements, and who would think to use them? Most people would probably just use some text-to-speech thing unless it was easy/they had good reason. I'm probably overthinking this, though.
    - orblivion 6y ago
      The audio equivalent of writing a ransom note with magazine clippings!
    - vsareto 6y ago
      Looks like it may be Microsoft Anna text-to-speech. The poster added reverb and echo and it was very, very close to the youtube security video that captured the warnings. The device that recorded that may have also skipped on its own recording and may not be perfect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B--BNdnuvA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B--BNdnuvA The original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU
      - doctorshady 6y ago
        This is probably a much more likely explanation; we'll see when we get bodycam footage or anything else if there's a better recording of what was being played. But for whatever it's worth, most TTS engines are modeled around well known voiceover people. It's still possible that since the engine didn't reproduce a 1:1 copy and there's no discernable (at least to me) artifacts in the one copy of sound footage we have, that was the real person, and she just announced it slightly differently.
  - takeda 6y ago
    > 3) This woman recalls a male voice but the news played a female voice. This goes to show how bad our memories are! Here is the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU I actually also watched the video before reading that it was a female voice and also thought it was male.
    - orblivion 6y ago
      Holy shit I think the same thing happened to me. Maybe this is one of those perception quirks rather than a memory quirk. Listening again, I could see it being a man with a voice like David Sedaris.
segfaultbuserr 6y ago
> officers and witnesses heard a broadcast coming from the RV giving a dire warning: “Evacuate now. There is a bomb. A bomb is in this vehicle and will explode." Then, the voice started a 15-minute countdown. Metro Police Chief John Drake said the six officers at the scene quickly began to evacuate the area, going door-to-door. They redirected a man walking his dog along the street. This is surreal. Almost a scene from some Sci-Fi spy movie, in which the protagonist/antagonist performs a surgical attack on a strategic target while preventing unnecessary civilian death...
- Macha 6y ago
  Was pretty common (though not consistent) for the IRA to phone ahead to warn where they'd put bombs.
  - outoftheabyss 6y ago
    Ironically it was on an occasion when a bomb was phoned in that led to the single biggest atrocity during the troubles. 29 people killed by a cat bomb in Omagh. We may not be living in peace today has it not happened
    - sillysaurusx 6y ago
      What’s a cat bomb?
      - throwaheyy 6y ago
        Probably a car bomb. The IRA were infamous for those.
        sillysaurusx 6y ago
        Thanks. Apparently it's no longer cool to ask questions on HN, since I had no idea what a cat bomb was, yet a mod flagged it regardless.
supernova87a 6y ago
That voice announcing evacuation sounds very professional, not like a computer synthesized voice... I wonder if they will try to trace that.
- optimalsolver 6y ago
  If they do, it will be a case of no good deed going unpunished.
  - joseph_grobbles 6y ago
    It's a good deed that they broadcast this message? Why a rational human would broadcast this message- a) The penalties if there were deaths would be much, much more severe. The manpower involved in the hunt would be exponentially larger. b) They have some other goal that would be sabotaged if there were deaths. c) They have morality and can rationalize bombing buildings, but not killing people. This isn't a "good deed". It's a presumably rational person playing the situation.
    - mckirk 6y ago
      Isn't acting out of a sense of morality the definition of a 'good deed'? Granted, bombing stuff hardly classifies but if you decide it's necessary to bomb something, preventing unnecessary harm for moral reasons could still be seen as a 'good deed'.
      - artificialLimbs 6y ago
        No. Some people think killing Jews is moral, for instance.
        takeda 6y ago
        Yep, as long as you can explain that someone is a bigger monster than you are you can justify yourself killing anyone.
        6y ago
culopatin 6y ago
Somehow the warning made it terrifying for me. Just an explosion with no warning would’ve been more normal to me somehow. It feels like a video game level where you have a countdown to solve a puzzle and you’re trying to save someone or something from the explosion.

drtillberg 6y ago

Local TV News managed to interview a neighbor from directly across the street where the explosion occurred[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iag6cTWpgq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iag6cTWpgq8

orblivion 6y ago
Interesting things to consider. 1) I heard something about "fake reports" about gunshots. But maybe the perp shot off some guns just to get the cops to show up? 2) This woman stuck around for 15 minutes or a half hour while this thing was saying "you need to evacuate, this has a bomb"??? 3) This woman recalls a male voice but the news played a female voice. This goes to show how bad our memories are!
- macintux 6y ago
  > This woman stuck around for 15 minutes or a half hour while this thing was saying "you need to evacuate, this has a bomb"??? Watching a video, the audio was so surreal I had to ask myself how I would respond if I heard that without any clue where it was coming from. Hopefully I never find out, but I guess now I'm a bit more mentally prepared to not linger.
- resonantjacket5 6y ago
  There were gunshots sounds but we're not sure if it was audio from the RV or actual gun shots
  - orblivion 6y ago
    This makes for such a fascinating story. Supervillain type stuff. Except fortunately in this case a supervillian with some sort of code of ethics.
    - sillysaurusx 6y ago
      Let's not idolize crazy. Fascinating, yes. But supervillains have redeeming qualities. There's nothing redeeming about a car bomb.
      - ALittleLight 6y ago
        Well playing a warning and picking a time and place to minimize casualties is some kind of redeeming. It would certainly be worse if they tried to kill people, picking a crowded place and time.
        sillysaurusx 6y ago
        I guess. I'm just sad I lived to see a second legit terrorist attack on American soil. I remember being in 8th grade when sept11 happened.
        ALittleLight 6y ago
        I think there have been several attacks of this magnitude or worse since September 11. e.g. The Boston Marathon bombing or the anthrax attacks, or Christopher Dorner (though maybe that's less terrorist and more revenge). There have been lots. I think, so long as this wasn't a test run for a coordinated attack on the telecoms, then this is not a very bad terrorist attack.
        sillysaurusx 6y ago
        Yeah, that’s a good point. I forgot entirely about the Boston marathon bombing. And in comparison, that one was indeed much worse... my Airbnb host at the time was participating in the race, and almost got caught in the explosion. Hmm. Well, it will be interesting to see whatever motivated this bombing.
- astura 6y ago
  > I heard something about "fake reports" about gunshots. But maybe the perp shot off some guns just to get the cops to show up? Reports of gunshots weren't fake because multiple witnesses heard gunshots. No idea if it was related to the bombing or not. Example: https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/25/us/nashville-explosion/index.html?fbclid=IwAR2eobyKNLHiZ1eLupyVr7U-3qmwgXkgG2cjbXehvzpozfETlLTR28EZ7RY https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/25/us/nashville-explosion/index.... >McCoy said he was originally woken up by what he believed were gunshots prior to the explosion. He got up and looked out the window, he said, but went back to bed when he didn't see anything. Asked if the noise he heard could have been something other than gunfire, McCoy emphasized that he believed it was, saying he owns a gun and goes shooting, so he's familiar with the sound of gunshots.
  - partiallypro 6y ago
    The prevailing theory is that there were no gun shots, but gun shots were played over the speakers to wake people up so they would evacuate.
    - Throwaway1771 6y ago
      Why ammo in RV then?
      - bigbubba 6y ago
        Perhaps the RV was stolen from an American.
- js2 6y ago
  Re 3, here's some more examples: "How Many of Your Memories Are Fake?" https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/how-many-of-your-memories-are-fake/281558/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/how-many-... "Reliability of Eyewitness Reports to a Major Aviation Accident": https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=ijaaa https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&co...
- doctorshady 6y ago
  Maybe she was right, and there were two voices? The female announcement sounds like it was edited. Badly. This might explain the strange verbiage as well ("All buildings" stands out. That particularly phrase, with its inflection, sounds like it originally came from the end of a sentence too). I've heard other people say it sounds like the same voice used by the city during the summer protests or something along those lines. For the purposes of arguing, let's say someone got ahold of some municipal evacuation recordings and chopped them up for this. It's not likely they had enough phrases to warn people a bomb would be going off in specifically fifteen minutes. EDIT: For anyone curious about other instances of bad edits, listen to the word "this"; there's another word before that, and it was cut off: "thi-this area must be evacuated now". Also, "if you can hear this message, <unnatural pause> evacuate now." It's not likely any professional voiceover person would announce this way, nor would anyone who's paid attention to basic edits before consider this passable. If this is all true, I guess the next question to ask is who would have access to those announcements, and who would think to use them? Most people would probably just use some text-to-speech thing unless it was easy/they had good reason. I'm probably overthinking this, though.
  - orblivion 6y ago
    The audio equivalent of writing a ransom note with magazine clippings!
  - vsareto 6y ago
    Looks like it may be Microsoft Anna text-to-speech. The poster added reverb and echo and it was very, very close to the youtube security video that captured the warnings. The device that recorded that may have also skipped on its own recording and may not be perfect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B--BNdnuvA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B--BNdnuvA The original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU
    - doctorshady 6y ago
      This is probably a much more likely explanation; we'll see when we get bodycam footage or anything else if there's a better recording of what was being played. But for whatever it's worth, most TTS engines are modeled around well known voiceover people. It's still possible that since the engine didn't reproduce a 1:1 copy and there's no discernable (at least to me) artifacts in the one copy of sound footage we have, that was the real person, and she just announced it slightly differently.
- takeda 6y ago
  > 3) This woman recalls a male voice but the news played a female voice. This goes to show how bad our memories are! Here is the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU I actually also watched the video before reading that it was a female voice and also thought it was male.
  - orblivion 6y ago
    Holy shit I think the same thing happened to me. Maybe this is one of those perception quirks rather than a memory quirk. Listening again, I could see it being a man with a voice like David Sedaris.

segfaultbuserr 6y ago

> officers and witnesses heard a broadcast coming from the RV giving a dire warning: “Evacuate now. There is a bomb. A bomb is in this vehicle and will explode." Then, the voice started a 15-minute countdown. Metro Police Chief John Drake said the six officers at the scene quickly began to evacuate the area, going door-to-door. They redirected a man walking his dog along the street. This is surreal. Almost a scene from some Sci-Fi spy movie, in which the protagonist/antagonist performs a surgical attack on a strategic target while preventing unnecessary civilian death...

Macha 6y ago
Was pretty common (though not consistent) for the IRA to phone ahead to warn where they'd put bombs.
- outoftheabyss 6y ago
  Ironically it was on an occasion when a bomb was phoned in that led to the single biggest atrocity during the troubles. 29 people killed by a cat bomb in Omagh. We may not be living in peace today has it not happened
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    What’s a cat bomb?
    - throwaheyy 6y ago
      Probably a car bomb. The IRA were infamous for those.
      - sillysaurusx 6y ago
        Thanks. Apparently it's no longer cool to ask questions on HN, since I had no idea what a cat bomb was, yet a mod flagged it regardless.

supernova87a 6y ago

That voice announcing evacuation sounds very professional, not like a computer synthesized voice... I wonder if they will try to trace that.

optimalsolver 6y ago
If they do, it will be a case of no good deed going unpunished.
- joseph_grobbles 6y ago
  It's a good deed that they broadcast this message? Why a rational human would broadcast this message- a) The penalties if there were deaths would be much, much more severe. The manpower involved in the hunt would be exponentially larger. b) They have some other goal that would be sabotaged if there were deaths. c) They have morality and can rationalize bombing buildings, but not killing people. This isn't a "good deed". It's a presumably rational person playing the situation.
  - mckirk 6y ago
    Isn't acting out of a sense of morality the definition of a 'good deed'? Granted, bombing stuff hardly classifies but if you decide it's necessary to bomb something, preventing unnecessary harm for moral reasons could still be seen as a 'good deed'.
    - artificialLimbs 6y ago
      No. Some people think killing Jews is moral, for instance.
      - takeda 6y ago
        Yep, as long as you can explain that someone is a bigger monster than you are you can justify yourself killing anyone.
      - 6y ago

culopatin 6y ago

Somehow the warning made it terrifying for me. Just an explosion with no warning would’ve been more normal to me somehow. It feels like a video game level where you have a countdown to solve a puzzle and you’re trying to save someone or something from the explosion.