Matt Olberding , Andrew Wegley
About 50 passengers waited outside the Lincoln Airport for up to an hour on Wednesday morning after the terminal was evacuated when a “suspicious package” was detected in luggage going through security screening.
The terminal reopened around 11 a.m., about an hour after the evacuation was ordered.
Rachel Barth, the airport’s director of communications and customer engagement, said Transportation Safety Administration employees at 9:45 a.m. detected a suspicious package during the normal luggage screening process.
Barth said that Lincoln Police, Lincoln Fire and Rescue and the Nebraska State Patrol all came to the airport to investigate the “package,” which turned out to be a passenger’s laptop computer.
Barth said she didn’t know for sure whether the computer was in a checked bag or whether the person had it with them in a carry-on bag. She also said officials still don’t know for sure why it set off alarms in the security screening process.
The airport tweeted news about the evacuation at 10:03 a.m., just minutes after a United Airlines flight departed the Lincoln Airport for Denver.
She said no flights had to be canceled but some were delayed, with the airport’s website showing one late-morning flight to Chicago departing an hour late.
Shortly after the terminal was evacuated on Wednesday morning, there was an emergency call reporting a possible bomb threat on a flight bound for Lincoln, but the call was canceled minutes later.
Barth said that call was related to the suspicious package but was due to a miscommunication.
