Gas leak hoax has shattering impact

Friday night, a man who identified himself as a firefighter called a Burger King restaurant in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, to tell the workers they were in danger.

The gas levels in the building had reached explosive levels, he told the restaurant manager authoritatively. To ensure everyone’s safety, they needed to relieve the pressure. To do that, they needed to break the windows.

The workers had never heard anything like it before, but the caller sounded like a professional. They panicked, ran to their cars and promptly started smashing the restaurant’s windows from the outside using tire irons.

“I guess I was a little scared,” employee Ethan Grew told WCOO. “My other co-workers were doing it so I just followed along.”

By the time police arrived, all the ground floor windows were shattered. Authorities broke the news to the “frantic” manager, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported: There was no gas leak, no firefighter.

There was only, it appeared, a prankster targeting a fast-food restaurant — again.

The gas leak hoax has crisscrossed the country in recent months, hitting Burger Kings in Oklahoma and California, as well as Jack in the Box and a Wendy’s in Arizona.

A day before the incident in Coon Rapids, a caller claiming to be from the fire department told workers at a Burger King in Shawnee, Oklahoma, that there were high levels of carbon monoxide in their building, making it necessary for all the windows to be broken.

The panicked workers used chairs to shatter the glass, KFOR reported.