Dud Bomb on 210 Is No Valentine

The thing bounced out of the bed of a truck, rolled to the side of the freeway, then lay quietly.

That’s all it needed to do, it turned out, to make rush hour a nightmare for thousands of Los Angeles-area commuters Monday evening.

Hours later, a military expert determined that the thing was just an old, inert piece of military ordnance.

But not until both sides of the 210 Freeway in Sylmar had been closed for more than three hours, creating huge backups.

The incident started about 3:30 p.m. when a motorist called the California Highway Patrol to report that an “aerial bomb” had tumbled onto the westbound lanes, coming to rest on the shoulder just east of Roxford Street as a truck sped away.

The thing was 7 feet long -- metallic and cylindrical, with a pointed nose.

It looked menacing. Or at least CHP officers thought so and called the Fire Department. City firefighters also thought it looked menacing. They called the Los Angeles Police Department bomb squad, which thought so too, but couldn’t figure out just what it was.

“It must have been very convincing,” CHP Officer Patrick Kimball said.

By 5 p.m., police closed the eastbound lanes of the freeway. By 6 p.m., all lanes on both sides of the freeway were closed.

Cars lined up by the thousands. Authorities drew up plans to evacuate nearby homes.

That’s when a worker for the U.S. Department of Defense saw coverage of the incident on television and called his supervisor in Ventura County, said LAPD Capt. Michael Moriarty.

The supervisor was flown to the scene in an LAPD helicopter, and in a few minutes, he was able to conclude that the thing was in fact an old weapon, though not operational, police said.

“It’s just a very large paperweight” now, Moriarty said.

The bomb was removed by a truck, but it was nearly 9 p.m. before the CHP completely reopened the freeway.

LAPD Officer Mike Lopez said police believed the device to be a Mark 80 series “dumb” bomb. The military has agreed to store it, he said, and it was to be transported to Edwards Air Force Base.

Officials speculated that the inert bomb may have been destined for a movie set or a scrapheap, but as of late Monday, they had not found its owner.