The journey when Dr. Anne Jefferson's underwater temperature Recorder UTBI-001 was blown up. Paul airport bomb squad, she hoped she would still be able to recover five months of data stored. Amazingly, she did.
Jefferson, a research assistant in the Department of Hydrogeology at Oregon State University, has been using these devices to collect data on water temperature in stream channels along the Mississippi River. Over Thanksgiving weekend, she took the data logger UTBI-001 to the trunk of the rental car she had been using during the holidays. She and her husband had spent the holidays with the family and forgot to watch Trunk when they got back to the car for the airport. By the time they reached Oregon and found federal agents waiting for them at the gate, the damage had already been done.
The taxi company employee was caught by a suspicious five-foot length of PVC pipe filled with gravel that he found in the trunk of the car. The pipeline contains three battery-operated underwater temperature monitoring devices, and Trivia, which is bigger than a bottle cap, flashes LED lights.
Employees called the airport police, which in turn called the FBI, and eventually brought in a bomb squad.
When the sniffer dogs found nothing, the team pulled the pipes from the tree trunks and "exploded" them with a high-pressure stream of water. No explosion, but pipes of plastic pipe and gravel.
After confirming her story with airport officials in Oregon, Jefferson said, "We drove two hours from the airport in Corvallis, and were still waiting for a message from the Minneapolis airport that some UTBI-001 still Intact." No specifics, but it did mention some devices still had green lights blinking.
Massachusetts-based Outbreak, manufacturer of the UTBI-001 Tidbit Recorder, catches the wind of the story. According to Linda Kane, customer service manager, "We were able to reach out to Dr. Jefferson and let her know we wanted to try to retrieve the data."
Two weeks after the incident, Jefferson finally received all of UTBI-001 in a sealed police evidence bag.
Of the 15 hit UTBI-001 Jefferson was able to download data from only a few. She sent the remaining two UTBI-001 individuals to the seizure, and engineers were able to recover the rest of the data.
Having this temperature data is a huge relief. "Data is the foundation of research, and my postdoctoral research," Jefferson said, "without it, there would be a problem." It's not just Jefferson's research, scientists from several other universities are also involved in the project.
According to the onset of Cain, the data may have survived because of the nature of UTBI-001. Trims are designed to be submerged underwater and withstand harsh conditions. The data recorded by the electronic device is stored in eepm with RAM, which retains the data even if the power is cut off.
Overall, there were no huge injuries, though Jefferson hadn't tried or rented a car anywhere since the incident. "We might be on their blacklist," she said.
