Authorities Ready for Rising Flood of Scares, Officials Say

As bomb and anthrax scares multiply across California, bomb squads and rubber-suited hazmat teams seem called upon to be everywhere at once.

But fire and police departments say they are equipped and staffed to handle the swarm of calls, nearly all of which prove false. They have learned over the years, they say, how to determine quickly whether a threat is real.

Bomb scares have been rampant since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, joined by skyrocketing numbers of possible anthrax exposures in the last week. Most of the calls involve suspicious packages or substances. Only a few are hoaxes.

Past waves of false alarms during periods of anxiety, such as the bomb scares in the weeks after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and a wave of bogus anthrax reports in Los Angeles in 1998, have given departments valuable experience.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department handled about 300 bomb scares in the month after Sept. 11, about five times the normal monthly number, said department spokesman Capt. Ray Leyva.

But the bomb squad went to only a few of the calls, he said, because deputies in the field usually were able to confirm that no bombs were present. Over the years, Leyva said, police agencies have gotten better--and faster--at assessing threats.

When a bomb threat occurred at the Antelope Valley courthouse, deputies didn’t close the building during their search, as they might have years ago. One reason was that county workers, since the Oklahoma City bombing, have been trained how to spot suspicious items and assist deputies in bomb searches.

“It’s really cut our search times,” which makes hoaxes less disruptive, Leyva said.

Of the 300 bomb reports, only two or three involved telephoned threats, Leyva said, which is a typical number for a month. Most reports, he said, involved suspicious items, such as a lunch pail left on an aboveground natural gas pipe in West Covina.

For the Los Angeles Police and San Diego County Sheriff’s departments, reports of bomb scares have doubled since Sept. 11.

Still, officers are careful to avoid becoming complacent, Sheriff’s Det. Bill Cruzen said.

“Every call is different. Our training and education teach us that the one time you let your guard down is the time you’re going to get hurt.”

News of anthrax exposures in Florida, New York and Washington also have fueled fears and false reports. The Los Angles Fire Department has had 30 such calls in the last week, said Battalion Chief Robert Franco. The county Fire Department is getting about 100 a day, said Inspector Mike Beran. Both departments said that except for a brief period in 1998, anthrax reports were practically unheard of before September.

Stephen K. Moore, an FBI agent who investigated the 1998 wave of anthrax scares, said emergency crews were overloaded then, but, like bomb squads, have since learned to tailor responses to individual situations.

In Los Angeles city, “less than half the calls required the full-blown hazmat teams,” Franco said. The engine companies that first respond to anthrax reports consider many factors before calling for a hazardous materials team. Among the criteria, the first crew looks for signs of illness at the site, determines whether the substance came in the mail and considers whether the location is a likely target, such as a government office.

Although hazardous materials response teams are not overloaded, threats have kept them busy.

In Los Alamitos, the National Guard’s 9th Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team, one of nine such units across the country, has been barely able to catch its breath between calls, dashing to about two scares a day for the past week.

Last weekend, calls came hours apart from a Huntington Beach post office and Disneyland. On Tuesday, the unit was called twice to the Santa Ana Civic Center, first to test three suspicious letters sent to IRS offices and then to analyze white powder on a box of uniforms at the Sheriff’s Department.

Though the pace has been furious, it has not been unmanageable, said Maj. John M. Buethe, squad commander. When there are competing situations, the team has been able to split up and handle them simultaneously, he said.

Threats to media companies also have received high priority after the discovery of anthrax at the NBC and ABC television networks in New York and at American Media, a tabloid newspaper publisher in Florida.

The Simi Valley office of the Ventura County Star was closed Wednesday afternoon after an employee reported that an envelope felt like it contained powder. Emergency crews determined it was sugar.

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Times staff writers Tina Borgatta, Daren Briscoe and Timothy Hughes contributed to this report.