Thursday, July 26, 2007

Game in bag prompts airport evacuation

LONG BEACH (AP) — A suspicious item in checked luggage that prompted the evacuation of a terminal at Long Beach Airport on Thursday turned out to be an electronic game, authorities said.

Several hundred people were evacuated from the terminal for about 90 minutes and five arriving aircraft were held on the tarmac until the all-clear was given.

Transportation Security Administration screeners spotted the suspicious item while X-raying a checked bag around 9:30 a.m., agency spokeswoman Jennifer Peppin said.

"It is basically a handheld game board that a passenger packed," she told Fox News Channel.

The item turned out to be a handheld electronic game board in a "raw form" that showed its wiring, she said.

"It certainly was nothing but it certainly looked like something. It had all the wires and components that you would see in an explosive device," Peppin said.


It had wires and electrical components, so that makes it a bomb? How the hell would any of those characters know what a bomb looked like? Has it occurred to any of those people that all modern electronics have "wires and components"? Did anyone notice something called explosives connected to the "wires and components"?
In the meantime, grandmothers still have to take off their shoes, and nail files are confiscated. And they wonder why people think their tax money is misspent.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

And if this is the line of thinking used in the airport, why don't cell phones, blackberries, ipods and pagers set off red flags?

BobG said...

I think it's because the people working aren't too bright.

The Other Mike S. said...

Amazing. The problem is, they have no incentive to actually THINK about what they may have on their hands. No .GOV employee ever got fired for over reacting to a supposed security situation.

Remember the electronic faces in Boston? Hell, they probably all got promotions.

Full-On-Forward said...

Cool Lizard Pic. I don't know why the Spider erks so many. I kept a Black Widow in an Aquarium and it molted/shed 3 times. She was about as big around as a dime (Not Quite) on her body. Biggest I've ever seen but she was hand feed grasshoppers!

I was goona figure out a way to milk them as I heard Venom was 10,000 bucks per like less than 1/32 of a drop or less. But I never could find the males to breed or their teats to milk.(LOL)

I would Love to see a Live Wild Tarantula- None here in Southeast. Looks like little Lizard lost his tail in some type of attack- Great pics!!!!!!

John