POLICE STATION EVACUATED

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28985, 28 August 1959, Page 13

POLICE STATION EVACUATED

Courthouse Official Handcuffed

(New Zealand Press Association) NELSON. August 27. Nelson Police Station was hurriedly evacuated early yesterday afternoon, and a senior Courthouse official spent an hour m handcuffs, all because a person, or persons, unknown set off a smoke canister in the nearby Lands and Survey Department. These incidents were part of the high jinks which took place in the celebration of the centenary of the Government Buildings in

Nelson. i At 1 o’clock yesterday a smoke! bomb in a bucket started to ( operate in the door of the Lands and Survey Department. As clouds of heavy brown smoke] wafted up the stairs and rolled through doorways, the department's staff downed pencils and evacuated the building. It was then that a senior officer from the adjoining Justice Department came on the scene Whipping up the bucket with its still fuming canister, he went off to the police station nearby Inside the station he dived from loom to room, concealed behind his smoking bucket and leaving a cloud of fumes. Police organisation in time of crisis carried the day. however. Four burly constables marched across to the Courthouse, traced the offender by the smell <so they claimed today) and marched him back to the station under “arrest.” By the time the smoke had cleared. the offender had been securely handcuffed and allowed to return to his desk in the Courthouse. For more than an hour he struggled with the cuffs, but they were designed to stay on and they did. "Sorry, the key's lost," said the police when he • appealed; but finally they took pity on him. and he was released with stern warnings as to his fate should such an incident w»r n<r*>in