Around 10am I was walking down Hope St. to the Farmer’s Market when a white van with flashing lights and a siren whizzed by. At Rochambeau police had set up a detour for several blocks. Everything was calm, people walking on the sidewalk right through the blocked area.
I thought it was a problem with the water main repairs. Then, maybe, a gas leak. I asked a woman outside the Festival Ballet if it was a gas leak, she said that they’d been told to evacuate, no reason why.
A bus driver stopped at the detour honked to get the attention of a police officer who ignored him. The cops looked disdainful.
Further down the street, a woman said she saw them take a bomb-sniffing robot into Festival Ballet. She thought it was funny that people were shopping at the CVS right next door without any interruption. The white vans were parked in the parking lot next to the ballet building. I continued to the Farmer’s market, and when I walked back traffic was moving normally, police were packing some big equipment into one of the white vans.
I guess we’ll all see it on the news.
And here’s Channel 6, it was Bank of America that triggered the bomb scare for a suspicious package.
Kmareka.com 
Interesting. It’s pretty easy to spoof Caller-ID and even BTN on calls now – so I can understand how this would happen. That said, BofA kind of deserves the terror.
BofA deserves investigative reporting, terror hurts us all.
Bomb threats are like false alarms-they can cost innocent lives as first responders rush to a scene,maybe unable to answer a life and death call elsewhere.Nancy’s right-Bof A sucks and should be investigated by the right authorities.
Well – the spoofing methodology I know about is highly untraceable. The only times they’ve every really caught anyone is people inevitably tip their hand.
This whole thing was insane. There was no threat. A friend of mine and her gym-partner stopped at the ATM and one forgot her book bag.
It’s pretty sad when people’s first impression to a backpack on the floor is “this might be a bomb”. It’s even worse when nobody just walks over and opens it.
After the anti-bomb robot and technician determined that the bag was of no consequence, they still took the bag down to the station and *cut it open* to get the contents out.
This is clearly a ‘when all you have is a hammer’ problem, combined with mass-hysteria. If I saw a bag left at the ATM, I would have just opened it to determine who it belonged to, I actually have returned wallets and cards left at that very ATM before. If I was the responding officer, I would have done the same. What kind of mass-hysteria and paranoia leads to closing a main street and evacuating a city block over a backpack?! This wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t get that grant money to buy bomb-sniffing robots and anti-blast suits.