Squad Tackles False Alarms and Red Alerts

On Wednesday it was a suspicious, but ultimately benign, piece of luggage that set the Los Angeles Police Department’s bomb squad in motion.

But occasionally, the highly trained detail runs up against something with a far more dangerous potential--a World War II-era grenade in somebody’s attic, for instance, or an ill-made pipe bomb.

Last June, two members of the squad were searching a house near downtown Los Angeles when a massive cache of fireworks blew up, almost in their faces, injuring them and almost a dozen other police officers who were nearby.

Three years ago two other squad members, Arleigh McCree and Ron Ball, were killed while trying to defuse a bomb in North Hollywood.

“You never know what you’re going to find,” said Lt. Daniel Lang, the squad’s commanding officer. “So on every call, we always assume it’s a dangerous device.”

That was the approach taken Wednesday, when customs officials at Los Angeles International Airport alerted the squad that an X-ray device had detected a suitcase that seemed to contain three sticks of dynamite.

To make matters worse, the luggage was headed for loading on an Avianca jetliner bound for Colombia, where on Monday an Avianca jet that had just left a Bogota airport exploded in midair, killing 107 people. A caller later claimed that drug lords had planted a bomb on the plane.

“We couldn’t say for sure that it was dynamite,” Lang said, referring to what was inside the suitcase at LAX. “But we couldn’t say for sure that it was not.”

The response to such a quandary is always to blow up whatever it is, just to be on the safe side, he said. So that is what officers did in a remote area of the airport Wednesday morning. What had appeared lethal in the X-ray examination of the luggage turned out to be a harmless video game.

False alarms such as that are the order rather than the exception, Lang said.

Of the approximately 550 calls the nine-member squad gets each year, only a handful--perhaps three or four--result in the discovery of something that could result in a serious explosion, Lang said. The squad is called to LAX two or three times a month, the lieutenant said.

When confronting a suspicious package, officers don heavy protective clothing and try to examine the device using a remote-control robot.

If the device cannot be defused, it is placed inside a huge, hollow steel ball and is removed by trailer to a safe area for disposal.