It's been a wild month of bomb scares at East Bay BART stations! In the latest incident last night, their service was disrupted for about two hours while a bomb squad investigated a threat on an Alameda-Contra Costa Transit bus parked beneath BART tracks.
SF Gate reports that at around 7 p.m. Tuesday, a caller told police that an AC Transit bus parked underneath the BART tracks at Seventh and Chester streets had been packed with explosives.
That call sent the the Alameda County Sheriff's Office bomb squad and K-9 units to the scene, closing the West Oakland Station for over two hours.
The Transbay Tube was also closed during the scare, leaving large crowds of commuters on both sides of the Bay stranded.
According to SF Gate, one of the dogs "got a positive hit" on an area of the bus that bomb detection robots couldn't reach, so a human detection technician in full Hurt Locker garb had to search the area. However, no explosives were found.
"It's always better to have a false positive than a false negative," sheriff's spokesman Sgt. J.D. Nelson told Bay City News.
No explosives found, the West Oakland BART station reopened at around 9:15 p.m., with full service resuming by about 9:25.
Last night's event was just the latest in a recent spate of these types of threats against BART, especially in the East Bay. On July 17, a man reported a bomb on a BART train at the North Berkeley station, on July 25 the morning commute was snarled after rumors of a bomb at Oakland's Coliseum station, and on August 1, a "suspicious package" shut down BART's Dublin/Pleasanton station. In all cases, the threat proved groundless.
