Bomb Scare Forces Evacuation at Mall : Crime: More than 50,000 people had to leave Glendale Galleria after an anonymous telephone threat. Three flour-filled packages were found.

More than 50,000 shoppers and employees were driven out of the Glendale Galleria Wednesday as police, responding to an anonymous telephone threat, searched out and destroyed three packages that turned out to be heavily wrapped five-pound bags of flour, labeled “bomb.”

“It was a rotten thing for somebody to do during Christmas time,” said Gil Juarez, the mall’s Santa, who--still in his red suit--comforted frightened children in a nearby parking lot as the streets around the mall filled with dismayed shoppers.

Some shoppers said there was widespread fear, but many others reported a fundamentally orderly evacuation of the 1.3-million square-foot mall.

“Everybody was screaming,” said April Regino, 14, who had caught a bus from Hollywood. A security guard “was running around for everybody to get out and everybody just started running,” she said.

The evacuation was ordered shortly after 2:45 p.m. when a male customer spotted a package marked “bomb 1” in a trash can in a second-floor bathroom, across from a police substation in the mall. About the same time, an anonymous caller told the 911 emergency switchboard in the Glendale police headquarters that there was a bomb in the mall, police said.

The call was traced--as all 911 calls are automatically--to a pay phone at Broadway and Pacific Avenue, about a block from the mall, police said.

After ordering the evacuation, police sent for the Los Angeles County sheriff’s bomb squad and searched the mall. Two more packages, labeled “bomb 3” and “bomb 4,” were found by Glendale police officers in two other restrooms, authorities said.

Operators of the bomb squad’s camera-equipped robot, guided by remote control, were unable to determine if the packages in the bathrooms were bombs, so bomb squad officers in protective clothing entered the building and blew up the packages with small charges of explosives, authorities said.

“This was somebody’s idea of a practical joke,” said Sheriff’s Deputy Angie McLaughlin, who described the packages as five-pound bags of flour wrapped in brown paper and plastic and bound in red tape.

McLaughlin said deputies will analyze the fake bombs to determine whether they were the work of the same person who pulled a similar stunt at a Carson mall. The South Bay Pavilion was evacuated for several hours after a device, believed to be a pipe bomb, was found in a restroom Dec. 1. It was detonated by a Sheriff’s Department bomb squad.

Galleria spokeswoman Judy Smith said it was too soon to determine how much the bomb scare cost the mall--which houses five major department stores and 264 specialty stores and restaurants--in lost Christmas business.

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Times staff writer Julie Tamaki wrote this story from reports filed by staff writer Vivien Lou Chen and correspondent Steve Ryfle.