Ticking package at Eureka, CA Post Office causes evacuation, turns out to be box of toys

Ticking package causing evacuation turns out to be box of toys
by Christine Bensen-Messinger, 1/31/2007

Eureka police and bomb experts from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office spent Tuesday morning making sure a suspicious ticking package at the Clark Street post office was not a bomb.

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Postal employees told police they had discovered a package in the normal flow of mail that was ticking and had evacuated all personnel from the building and called the Eureka Police Department, an EPD news release stated.

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The sender and recipient of the package, which was being sent to Trinidad from Connecticut, were eventually contacted and indicated that there were toys in the box. As a precaution, EOD personnel took an X-ray of the package and confirmed that it was harmless, the release stated.

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“By and large, people that send toys or any device that requires a battery … they should always pack them in the same box, but removed,” he said.

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These days he said the EOD team responds to an average of 11 calls a year, four or five coming from the post office. “It has always been a postal employee erring on the side of caution,” he said.

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