why it took "SWAT team members wearing protective gear" to sweep the Keystone Towers for squatters prior to sealing it up to be readied for implosion?
(See here for the story.)
What were they expecting to find, a small army of Mexican drug dealers or something?
Give me a break.
Actually, you'd be astonished. It is a fecal warehouse at this point. The stairwells were booby-trapped with shopping carts and other debris designed to make plenty of noise to warn the 'squatters" of incoming invaders. A cook lab or three would not have been out of the question or surprising, and gawd knows what else. The asbestos and lead paint hysteria is over the top for a simple walk through, but the denizens who have been living there are seriously scary, without much left to lose. It's a truly creepy, bombed out place with a long history of being inhabited.
What I don't get is, why make a sweep until the city is actually ready to implode it? As though plywood and knocking down the staircases will stop the zombies from coming back?
And to think: this was once the "V.I.P. Center!"
Ah, the 70s.
Yeah, it didn't make sense to me to sweep it now, either. Unless SWAT was simply trying to make a point.
I'm guessing they figured "Sweep it now; the majority will be scared off and find lodgings elsewhere, so we'll have less to do when it's time for the actual demolition."
SWAT used to use a disused school in our neighborhood for practice. We'd come over and listen to the clown posse. About as stealthy as an elephant stampede. We were threatened by the leader of this group when they had to bring one of their number out on a stretcher. He had shot himself -ricochets?- with that snappy M16 he carried. Two things transpired from this event. The cops stopped using the old school for their training. The Officer who threatened us got fired from the police. He left town a year later when it transpired that one of our Dad's was a Hell's Angel that thought he should pay weekly for threatening children.