SWAT team called on household spill

Thanks to Universal Hub and Deb Geisler, we can follow the story of a "hazardous materials" crisis when someone spilled cleaning supplies not far from Boston's state house. Allow me to play a minor-league Radley Balko and summarize the story:

July 2: The police were "called on a strange odor at 21 Temple St." This was handled as a "second-level hazardous materials response." A blogger reports that "Fox 25 reported that police had surrounded a 'meth lab.'" The occupant of the apartment was identified as a former MIT chemist, leading Deputy Fire Chief Robert Calobrisi to say, "Any time you have someone who knows what they're doing with chemicals, it can be a bad situation." Mad scientist on the loose!

The story soon began to unravel:

Several apartments directly behind the State House were evacuated last night after a resident barricaded herself in and poured ammonia or some type of chemical over the floors of her apartment.
 
A police SWAT team arrived early this morning and entered the building. The team eventually broke into the woman's apartment with full hazmat gear and forced her from the residence.

Ammonia is indeed "some type of chemical." It can even be dangerous under the wrong circumstances. But is a SWAT team necessary to deal with it? Boston Police Superintendent Rafael Ruiz said, "We don't want to take chances, that's why we took the proper procedures." Surely he should be aware that sending in a SWAT team is taking chances, that introducing a significant armed presence and breaking into a home is a risky action.

The latest account:

"It turned out to be household items such as shampoo, floor wax, and dish detergent," said Steve MacDonald, spokesman for the Boston Fire Department. "She was squirting, spraying these items on herself and on the floor and furniture in the apartment and mixing it all up."
 
Several bottles and boxes of Tide laundry detergent, along with one bottle of Mop & Glo, were scattered throughout the apartment, alongside disheveled furniture and on top of broken glass.

On the positive side, the police and firefighters who were on the scene apparently acted with suitable restraint. It wasn't their decision to treat a cleaning spill as a crisis. It's the officials who decided that a chemist who'd gone slightly nuts constituted a crisis who deserve the criticism, along with whoever the reporter was who dreamed a "meth lab" up. I predicted that the woman would be charged with using a "hoax device," as was done twice before in invented Boston crises; fortunately, I was wrong.