Lost car battery causes rush-hour scare

Yes, it's Halloween today — but that doesn't mean trickery wasn't afoot yesterday, too. Take, for example, the case of a car battery that masqueraded as a ... uh ... a ... well, something on the Gulf Freeway early in the afternoon rush hour:

What turned out to be a car battery in the Gulf Freeway caused a brief shutdown of all southbound lanes at Scott during today's afternoon rush.

The lanes were closed from about 3:40 to 4:15 p.m. as Houston Fire Department personnel checked to make sure the object wasn't some kind of hazardous device.

"It looked metallic from a distance. It was about 12 by 12 by 6 (inches) and lying in the road, and we didn't know what it was. Somebody called it in, and we treated it like the real thing until we knew different," District Chief Tommy Dowdy said.

So officials must have thought the battery was a bomb. That's understandable: A lot of stuff gets dropped on the freeway all the time — lawn chairs, mattresses, wood, frozen fish sticks — but they're distinctly not bomb-shaped (unless someone comes up with an explosive fish stick, in which case we're all doomed). In instances where something has a high probability of being a hazardous device, HFD's policy is one of caution, as you'd expect: "We're going to make sure what [the device] is before we walk up there and kiss it," Dowdy told the Chronicle.