Southern California has played host to a litany of different bomb scares in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing a week ago. It added to that list Monday night after flights status boards instructed passengers to evacuate the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).
The messages first came up on the display boards at around 9:47 p.m PDT Monday. The message of "An emergency has been declared in the terminal. Please evacuate," appeared on the flight status boards, causing a fair amount of panic and confusion. The messages did not stay up for long.
"After the mistake was discovered, airport staff removed the message from all the monitors by 9:54 p.m.," says airport spokesman Nancy Castles. "The airport's information technology staff will be looking at ways to ensure this accident does not happen again in the future."
Castles also noted that no alarms went off during the confusion and that nobody evacuated LAX's terminals. The airport released a statement after the incident explaining what happened.
"An erroneous emergency terminal evacuation notice was displayed for a few minutes," the statement explains, "after an airline contractor accidentally activated the message. No additional notification measures (such as an audible alarm) were activated and there were no reports of anyone leaving the terminal."
At first it was believed that the emergency messages could have been the work of a mischievous hacker, which would have only added to the list of threats that the southern California area has received lately. Those rumors of a hacker, however, were quickly dispelled.
"After investigating what caused the erroneous posting, LAX Airport Ops and Information Technology staffers reported that an airline contract employee, who is authorized to access the display system, was programming airline check-in information into a set of monitors for a particular flight when he accidentally activated the pre-programmed emergency terminal evacuation message," the statement says. "The airport's Information Technology staff will be looking at ways to ensure this accident does not happen again in the future."
The Los Angeles area has already had enough on its plate after a long list of bomb scares this past week. Already in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, there have been bomb threats on a Metrolink train, a local Hooters, Cal State Los Angeles' campus, and the Huntington Beach City Hall, to name a few.