A Day in the Life of LAPD Bomb Squad

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 13, 2009— -- On a recent day the Los Angeles Police Department bomb squad answered what they thought would be a routine call: a woman showing up at a fire station with boxes of what she thought were only fireworks.

It turned out to be far more dangerous.

"The stuff has been stored for a long time," squad member Det. Kevin Corn said. "It could be unstable."

So the bomb squad decided to bring in their total containment vessel, or TCV, and in their words "just make it go away." That means wrapping the volatile chemicals in the squad's own explosives, putting it into the TCV and blowing it all up.

Today, one of the squad's newest members, Officer Norma Stange gets the call. It's her first chance to use her training to dispose of real explosives.

While some bombs can be defused by remotes, often officers have to get up close and personal with potentially volatile explosive devices.

After putting on a protective suit, Stange walks gingerly, carrying the unstable chemicals that could ignite from something as simple as static in the air. She puts them in the TCV, which is a huge metal ball that sits on a truck body and is capable of safely detonating pounds of high explosives.

Moments later, at a safe distance from the TCV, she pushes the trigger. She jumps at the spark and almost instantly the explosives inside the TCV explode with a loud pop and smoke leaks out of the containment chamber.

For Stange, it's an important first, and there are congratulations and backslaps.

"It's very exciting," she says with a big smile. "I'm glad it was successful."

On this day, all ends loudly, but well. Still, in the background, the squad members worry about what nightmares might lie ahead.

The LAPD bomb squad makes about a thousand runs every year. Most turn out to be nothing. But the squad can never relax.

They've all seen pictures of devastating bomb attacks from Afghanistan and Iraq and other world hot spots, images that are always in the back of their minds.

"That threat has developed overseas, and certainly intelligence sources tell us it's something we may have to deal with here," says Lt. Rick Smith, the officer in charge of the bomb squad.

In fact, the bomb squad has seen it before. In 1979 the Alphabet Bomber killed three people at Los Angeles International Airport. In 1990, a 2000- pound truck bomb was parked outside the Internal Revenue Service office in West L.A., though it failed to explode.