Bomb on board the ferry? Nope, it's just Charlie

This is the story of how Charlie Young was mistaken for a nuclear weapon.

It begins during a trip to the cardiologist one afternoon last week. Young, a retired Boeing engineer, was on a treadmill, an IV in his arm injecting him with radioactive isotopes as part of a test to check a stent that had been put in his heart a year earlier.

Jump forward a few hours to Young sitting on the Kingston-Edmonds ferry, surrounded by State Patrol troopers and Coast Guardsmen slowly moving toward his seat.

"It's here," Charlie remembers one of them saying, pointing at him and his backpack.

He noticed one of the men pointing a device in his direction.

Young — yes, literally the man himself — had set off a Coast Guard device used to detect nuclear weapons and dirty bombs.

Young knew immediately that his treatment was causing a false alarm.

"They asked, 'Do you have any radioactive material?' And I said, 'Yes I do,' " he said.

After showing them his wound from the IV as proof, Young was let go without further attention, except from some other passengers who continued to stare.

"There were a lot of people around asking them what was going on with me, but that was pretty much the end of it," Young said. "I was happy to see that they were capable and in charge of the situation and protecting me."

The Coast Guard says it isn't uncommon for the radiation pagers, commonly known as Geiger counters, to register a false alarm since the Guard began using them shortly after 9/11.

Some things you wouldn't expect have enough radiation to set off the alarm — various medical treatments, the porcelain in a toilet, even the potassium in a large shipment of bananas or cocoa.

"We do not take this lightly," said Coast Guard Lt. j.g. Ryan Erickson. "The Coast Guard takes this mission, securing the ports, very seriously."

Erickson is in charge of a Coast Guard team that boards ships in Puget Sound to check for possible security threats. Team members wear the counters to alert them to the presence of a possible nuclear weapon or dirty bomb, even though the gadgets have never gone off because of either of those things.

The pager can pick up radiation from a treatment such as Young's from about 40 feet away, Erickson said.

The Coast Guard works with the State Patrol to provide security for the ferries, but Guard teams are rarely aboard, Erickson explained. It was only because of a false bomb threat that had been made on the Edmonds-Kingston run earlier that day that the Coast Guard was on the ferry at all.

The last time the Guard was on board the ferries was in December, and the team registered a false radiation alarm on a person then, too, Erickson said.

Brian Alexander: 206-464-2026 or balexander@seattletimes.com