Saturday, February 23, 2008

Saturday Morning Strange But True...

Saturday morning, a Transportation Security Officer working the x-ray machine saw two razor blades in what appeared to be a book in someone's carry-on bag. During the bag check, the razor blades were found inside the pages of a Bible, and bag belonged to... a priest. Can't make this stuff up.

My job at TSA involves collecting, analyzing and sharing information. This includes regularly checking a TSA site run by our Transportation Security Operations Center that provides real-time reports on incidents that happen around the country. These reports include: weapons found at checkpoints, people behaving badly on planes, terminal evacuations, suspected IEDs, planes that lose contact with air traffic control and other incidents.

Photo of a gun found in a carry-on bagOn any given day, there are dozens of reports sent in from airports ranging from routine to bizarre to truly scary. On Friday, we posted a story on our website about five incidents reported into the operations center that morning before 9:00 a.m. EST, including three guns (two loaded) and two knives found in carry-on bags. All of the people who got caught with guns said they didn't know the gun was in their bag, but the man with the knives said he knew he couldn't take them on the plane, but really wanted to anyway. He was arrested.

From time to time, I'll be posting stories about some of the things in the incident reports that catch my eye and might be of interest to you. Have a good weekend.