TSA to Add Bomb Experts at 100 Airports

The federal government is adding specially trained bomb detection experts to airports nationwide in an expansion of a program developed in St. Louis.

The Transportation Security Administration, which oversees airport screening, is putting 300 bomb appraisal officers in 100 airports over the next year and a half, adding another layer of security at checkpoints, the agency announced Tuesday at Lambert Field.

Passengers won't encounter anything different at the checkpoints. The officers help and train screeners to find explosive devices by looking at the X-ray image. The officers are trained to tell immediately whether a digital camera, for example, is wired to explode. The officers will be used wherever they're needed - at the metal detectors or where luggage is screened.

In the past, suspicious items have led to the closure of airport concourses so that screeners and police officers could sort out whether the item was a threat or not. In most cases, the items are nonthreatening, Airport Police Chief Paul Mason said.

That was the case in February, when a security worker at Lambert noticed the image that looked like a gun on the X-ray machine. The screener was slow to contact police, and the person with the suspicious item was gone by the time law enforcement arrived.

Airport officials cleared Concourse A and unloaded passengers from five planes to be rescreened. They later discovered that the item was a gun-shaped belt buckle. Neither of Lambert's two bomb appraisal officers were on hand to help make that determination immediately. Two more appraisal officers will be added to the airport in the next 18 months, increasing the chance that an officer will be available whenever similar incidents occur.

"The record has proven that where bomb appraisal officers are active, the closures are minimized to the point of being near zero," said Bill Switzer, federal security director, who oversees the TSA's operations in the St. Louis area. The program was developed in 2003. Switzer refined it. The federal government began putting bomb appraisal officers in several airports, including Lambert, in September.

Since then, officers have found elements of improvised explosive devices, Switzer said, but he wouldn't disclose how often or at which airports.

Beside him at Tuesday's press conference was a table of items commonly carried aboard airplanes, such as tubes of toothpaste, shoes and a teddy bear. Bob Henrich, a bomb appraisal officer at Lambert, held up the teddy bear. He reached inside its stuffing and pulled out an explosive.

"Any innocent item, the more innocent the better, can be used to camouflage these threats," he said. "As the threat is fluid and evolving, we must be also."

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