Two days of evacuations at LAX

Passengers using Los Angeles International Airport were evacuate on Thursday for the second straight day in a row due to security concerns. The alert was triggered by something found in a piece of luggage. The item in question turned out to be a sprinkler pipe.

The sprinkler pipe was responsible for the entire departure area, ticket counter and stores in the upper level of Terminal One closing down. People were evacuated from the areas when the item was found in a piece of checked luggage, and sent to wait on the sidewalk outside the airport. Two airplanes which had landed were not allowed to taxi into the terminal but were held off at the end of the runway.

Airport security called in a bomb squad. A spokesman for the Federal Transportations Security Administration, Nico Melendez, said that the bomb squad suspected a pipe bomb.

When the owner of the luggage was located, some of the mystery was solved. The man was senior staff in a sprinkler company.  The entire event took about an hour and a half.

LAX was also evacuated for about two hours on Wednesday when a bomb squad took two mortar shells out of someone’s luggage. The shells did not contain explosives but had been picked up in a baggage screening process that detects explosives.