Blackbird Leaves Loud Calling Card Nervous Residents Suspect Disaster When Jet Breaks Sound Barrier

The reports sounded ominous, even conspiratorial: A home blew up in Spokane, seconds before a propane tank exploded in the Valley.

But the explosions didn’t happen. Bomb-weary Inland Northwest residents were spooked by a NASA surveillance plane’s sonic boom.

The jet cracked the sound barrier about 11 a.m. Thursday, sparking jitters, panic and some creative thinking about what had caused the “ba-boom” that reverberated from Spokane to Sandpoint and beyond.

“I was at home and heard it,” said Barbara Buckley, a dispatcher with the Post Falls Police Department, one of about 20 people who reported the boom to Post Falls police. “I thought it was an explosion. I think that’s foremost on everybody’s minds right now. It was pretty spooky. It shook my house.”

People have good reason to be nervous: Three pipe bombs exploded in Spokane last month.

On April 1, a group of armed men set off two bombs and robbed a bank. One bomb exploded outside The Spokesman-Review’s Valley office; the other went off minutes later inside a U.S. Bank branch at Argonne and Sprague.

Another pipe bomb exploded outside City Hall on April 29. No one was injured in any of the explosions, but the emotional aftershocks still are reverberating.

Scattered reports across the Inland Northwest initially suggested a cluster of explosions Thursday. Emergency dispatchers fielded hundreds of calls from residents. Radio stations broke into their normal programming with reports of blasts. TV stations received calls from people who had heard the boom as far away as Montana.

“It must be pretty tense for this to attract all this attention,” said Florence Powell, who was working on a 600-piece jigsaw puzzle in her Valley home when she heard the boom.

She should know. One of her neighbors called Valley firefighters, thinking a propane tank had exploded in the Powells’ back yard in the 1500 block of North Hodges.

But Bob Powell, waiting for his fence man in his back yard when he heard the boom, just scoffed.

“I’m 80 years old,” he said, adding that he’d heard sonic booms throughout his life, although he wasn’t sure what causes them. “I’ve heard it all before. I’ve heard it here. I’ve heard it in the country. It’s no big deal.”

Possible explanations for the boom ranged from the absurd to the plausible. Thunder. Sloppy construction work. An exploding transformer. A husband who had dropped something.

Rescue personnel also were called to the 3100 block of East 15th on a report of a natural gas explosion in a basement. The boom shook the house so severely that a 13-year-old boy who was home sick scooped up his dog and walked to a neighbor’s house.

The neighbor thought he smelled gas, so he called authorities.

The boy’s mother was walking to work when she heard what she thought was a sonic boom. When she got to work, she heard other news.

“I just was told my house exploded,” said the woman, who didn’t want her name used. “I thought I had lost a home, a son and a dog, all in the same moment.”

Her boss drove her home, where she found her house intact and her son and dog safe.

Down the street, neighbors popped out their front doors to see what was happening.

“I was cleaning up, and my husband was in the bathroom,” said one of the neighbors, Mildred Popejoy. “My husband thought I dropped something; I thought he dropped something.”

That “something” would have to be awfully loud to mimic the SR-71 Blackbird, a rare plane that can leap the Inland Northwest in a single bound at 2,000 mph. That’s nearly three times the speed of sound.

Fairchild Air Force Base officials said the reconnaissance plane was on a refueling mission.

The plane, operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was refueled in midair by a Fairchild tanker, then shrieked past the speed of sound as it flew away.

The Blackbirds were grounded because of their expense in 1990, but Congress shelled out $100 million last year to bring back a small fleet. A Blackbird on a training run out of California also rattled homes across Eastern Washington, North Idaho and Western Montana last November.

Spokane County sheriff’s Sgt. Jerry Fojtik, coordinator of the city-county 911 system, said his five operators responded to almost 100 calls about the boom, most in the first 10 minutes.

“Can we send a bill to the Air Force or whoever did it?” Fojtik asked. “They should really tell somebody before they do that.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Graphic: Lockheed SR-71 ‘Blackbird’

The following fields overflowed: BYLINE = Kim Barker Staff writer Staff writers Adam Lynn and Jim Camden contributed to this story.