Police evacuated protesters on the side of Highway 8 to the Lower Nicola fire hall after being dispatched to a bomb threat last Thursday.

The threat, however, was false and turned out to be two children who accidentally made an emergency call while playing the game Minecraft on a cellphone.

Merritt RCMP Cpl. Doug Stone said dispatchers overheard a conversation from a deactivated cellphone that mentioned someone had a bomb and was going to use it.

“The bomb references were actually involving this game,” Stone said.

Staff Sgt. Sheila White said two 911 calls were received back-to-back.

At least nine police officers were dispatched to the call at about 5 p.m.

The biosolids protest site on Highway 8 was evacuated as a precaution because that was the area the phone was mapping to, Stone said.

While protesters were evacuated, police identified the person the phone was registered to, and found the address for that person.

That led police to a house on Swakum Road, where Lower Nicola resident Sammie Spahan lives.

She told the Herald that her six-year-old son, his cousin and their friend had been playing at the end of the street with the deactivated cellphone, which her son had received from a family member.

Spahan left her home to travel into Merritt that afternoon and her son went with her, leaving the phone with his two companions — who are each about eight years old.

White said a dispatcher will call back to determine if a 911 call is false, and when the dispatcher did that, the children playing with the phone got scared and buried it.

Spahan soon received messages from neighbours who said there were multiple cop cars outside her home.

The police called Spahan as well.

She said police asked her to come back to the house to help locate the phone, with which she complied.

“They searched my house, and outside my house and all around. They couldn’t find the phone,” Spahan said.

She said police asked her son where his phone was and he told them he had lent it to his friend.

“My son was scared, he didn’t know what was going on,” Spahan said.

Police met with the friend and recovered the phone.

Stone said anyone who accidentally calls 911 should talk to the dispatcher and tell him or her it was an accidental call.