Anthrax Scare Forces Evacuation of Courts

In the fourth such incident in the Los Angeles area in a week, and the second in the San Fernando Valley, state court buildings were evacuated Monday because of an anthrax terrorism threat. Federal officials said that--like the other incidents--it was a hoax.

FBI spokeswoman Laura Bosley said an unidentified caller phoned 911 shortly after 11 a.m. declaring to an operator that “anthrax has been released in the Van Nuys courthouse.”

Anthrax disease spores, which can be fatal if inhaled, can be so easily propagated that the bacteria have frequently been studied as a possible biological warfare agent.

Sheriff’s deputies and fire officials evacuated as many as 2,000 people from the Superior and Municipal court buildings, bringing court business to a halt and leaving many to mill around outside the buildings for hours in frigid temperatures.

County Health Department officials held the evacuees outside the court buildings while health officials and FBI agents searched the facilities and gathered air samples for testing.

About 4 p.m. officials released the evacuees. But just in case the threat was genuine, officials instructed them to go home, avoid contact with relatives and pets, seal their clothes in plastic bags, take showers and watch for flu-like symptoms.

Presiding Superior Court Judge Robert W. Parkin declared a court emergency, closing the Van Nuys courts until Wednesday to ensure the buildings were safe. Today,, he said, court clerks would be redeployed to the San Fernando and other courthouses to handle any urgent matters.

Friday, about 100 people were quarantined for eight hours and given antibiotics when an anonymous caller told a court clerk that anthrax had been released into the air conditioning system at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court building in Woodland Hills.

Other such threats over the past week resulted in the evacuation and decontamination of workers at a 21-story office building in Westwood Village and a school district office in Riverside County.

A Los Angeles police spokesman last week put the cost of the Woodland Hills and Westwood scares at $500,000 apiece, saying police and fire officials planned to meet this week to discuss how to reduce the cost and disruption of such empty threats.

An FBI official said Monday that he knew of no plans for such a meeting but that participating agencies were constantly fine-tuning their approach to such incidents in any case.

“We are in a new era in terms of these kind of biological threats,” said FBI Special Agent John Schiman. “Rather than be sorry, we’re being safe. In each one of these threats we’ve learned from and modified the response,” reducing the expense and disruption involved, he said.

Schiman said authorities conducted a floor-by-floor search of the courthouses Monday and tested samples collected from the buildings at a county health department laboratory, which enabled officials to determine more rapidly whether anthrax was truly present.

Before the recent rash of threats, he said, samples in such incidents were taken to military laboratories, delaying results, sometimes for days.

Still, many of those caught in the courthouse melee wondered why an evacuation was necessary and complained that authorities appeared disorganized.

“The real story is, nobody knows what’s going on,” said a lawyer, who asked that her name not be used, as she waited in the cold outside the courthouse. “We’ve been going back and forth for hours and they keep changing their minds.

“Don’t we have a protocol for anthrax? It’s not like we haven’t had anthrax scares before.”

But county health officials countered that maximum precautions were necessary even with the low risk that the threat was genuine.

“The likelihood [of contamination] is very, very low,” said Dr. Jonathan E. Fielding, county director of public health. “But we are treating it seriously--as we have to.”