June 16--About once a day, a passenger at one of South Florida's three major airports tries to take an item through security that could be mistaken for a bomb.
Rather than evacuate terminals and alert police bomb squads, the Transportation Security Administration calls in explosive specialists, who usually determine it was a false alarm, allowing passengers to catch their planes.
"We get it all the time. People bring in replica hand grenades, and they show up on the X-ray as a real grenade," said Tim Lewis, federal security director for Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.
The explosive specialists have been working quietly behind the scenes for about five years, but the TSA is just now starting to talk about them.
Not to be confused with the officers who staff checkpoints, the specialists are highly trained experts in handling and identifying explosives. Most were hired directly out of the military or police bomb squads.
For instance, Stewart Houston, the top specialist at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International, spent 14 years in the U.S. Army as an explosives specialist. One of his jobs was to protect U.S. ground forces from improvised explosive devices in the Middle East and Kosovo. While working at civilian airports isn't nearly as intense, he said it's just as important.
"We're constantly on the lookout for anything that could be taken through security in a covert manner," he said.
In the past two years, specialists at all three of South Florida's airports have responded to an increased number of potential bombs; at Palm Beach International, the number has about doubled in that period, the TSA said.
"The job has evolved with additional duties and responsibilities," said Mike Arbit, an explosives specialist at PBIA, who has more than 20 years of bomb squad experience with the Fort Lauderdale police. "We respond to a variety of suspicious items, all of which the transportation security officers were unable to definitively identify as not being a threat."
The TSA won't say how many specialists work at each of South Florida's major airports, other than to note at least one is always available to respond within minutes.
"If we need two or three of them and it's 9 p.m. at night, they're all on-call all the time," Lewis said.
The explosives specialists move in whenever a TSA officer sees something suspicious on an X-ray screen. On average, they respond to a combined five alarms per week at the Miami, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood and Palm Beach international airports.
The suspicious items include laptops, high school science projects, fireworks, improperly packaged automobile air bags, medical devices or ammonium nitrate based fertilizers.
In one instance earlier this year, a passenger at PBIA packed paintball grenades, commonly used in military games, in a checked bag. Because they had the same characteristics as hand grenades, alarms went off on an explosive detection machine. A specialist determined they weren't dangerous.
Last week, a passenger carrying a container of pink powder at Miami International Airport caught the attention of security officers, but a specialist found it was harmless.
"Without the expertise of an explosive specialist, that lane might have been closed and a Hazmat team called to analyze the powder," said Sari Koshetz, TSA spokeswoman.
If the specialists find a real bomb or a substance that could be explosive, they call in the local police bomb squad. "Their job is to analyze if it's a real threat item," Lewis said.
The specialists also train TSA officers to recognize potentially explosive objects. Lewis said the specialists also will show security officers exact replicas of explosives that real terrorists used.
For instance, they reproduced the "Underwear Bomber" scenario, where a Nigerian man attempted to detonate plastic explosives in his underwear on an Amsterdam to Detroit Northwest Flight in 2009. They also replicated the "Shoe Bomber" case, where an Englishman attempted to detonate explosives in his shoes on an American flight from Paris to Miami in 2001.
"That kind of training is absolutely invaluable to us," Lewis said. "We're so much better because of their expertise."
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