White powder scares cost law enforcement time, money
USA TODAY Firefighters and federal agents have responded to more than 30,000 incidents involving suspicious powders, liquids or chemicals since 2001 in what authorities say is the terrifying legacy of the anthrax attacks after 9/11.
Postal service and law enforcement officials say thousands of the incidents are hoaxes involving white powder sent through the mail and thousands more are emergency calls to report powder found on countertops, in mailrooms and elsewhere.
"A single incident can warrant a huge response," says Billy Hayes of Washington, D.C.'s fire department. "It gets very expensive, not to mention the inconvenience."
There is no official count of the number of white powder calls in the seven years since letters poisoned with anthrax killed five people. But in just the past year, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service has responded to 2,893 incidents, many of which involved white powder, spokesman Douglas Bem says.
The FBI, which is called when a threatening note is found or when it otherwise appears a crime may have been committed, looked into more than 900 biological incidents from January 2007 to August 2008, "the majority of those incidents being white powder letters," spokesman Richard Kolko says.
There were an average of two hoax letter anthrax threats per week in the year BEFORE the real attacks of 2001. And there's been about 30,000 since then.
There isn't much to go on with this case. The letter and envelope on the FBI's web site seem to have been printed with a computer. They were sent from Amarillo, Texas. The envelope shows it was postmarked at 2 p.m. on Saturday, October 18.
The culprit didn't bother to correct the spelling of "REPRERCUSSIONS" in the letter. It seems odd to blame the FDIC for anything. The FBI redacted the other person or organization we're supposed to blame. I'd like to know if all the letters were postmarked at the same time and place, if they all contained the same letter, if there's anything odd about the addresses, etc. But, the FBI has all that, so it can't be of much help.
I know some true nut cases in Texas, but I have no reason to believe they'd do anything like this.
I'd probably start with a list of people who had "tens of thousands" more than $100,000 in some bank that failed.