An Evacuation Triggered by ... Ash

A gray, powdery substance found in an envelope forced the evacuation Wednesday of the administrative offices of the Fairview Developmental Center in Costa Mesa.

“We found out it was ash,” said Lt. Karl Schuller, a spokesman for the Costa Mesa Police Department. “It was a nonlethal substance.”

The hubbub started about 1:40 p.m., Schuller said, when police received a call from the state hospital for the developmentally disabled on Harbor Boulevard, saying four employees had received hand-delivered envelopes, one of which contained the substance.

“We had everyone and their brother there,” Schuller said, adding that those responding included representatives of the state police, California Highway Patrol, Costa Mesa fire and police departments, Huntington Beach hazardous materials squad and the Orange County Health Care Agency.

The evacuation lasted more than three hours. Eventually, Schuller said, investigators talked to the deliverer of the envelopes, who told them that the offending powder was a harmless gray-colored ash. Police would not name that person.

According to Zarir Bhandara of Irvine, that person was his wife, Tenaaz, who works at the center as an individual program coordinator. Bhandara said Wednesday that she was hand-delivering the envelopes because in them were her responses to questions from management -- “but she did not put in any ash.”

A native of India, he said, his wife sometimes wears ash on her forehead during work hours as an expression of religious devotion, “but there’s no remote chance that it would get into an envelope.”

He said that neither he nor his wife -- who declined to be interviewed -- could explain how the ash had gotten into an envelope. “Maybe somebody planted it there,” he said.

According to Schuller, the matter is under investigation.

The incident occurred two days after federal officials discovered traces of ricin, a lethal toxin, in a mail-handling area on Capitol Hill.