At about 9:10 this morning I caught this from WAVY TV 10 in my Facebook newsfeed:

BREAKING: Unattended package at Norfolk International Airport tested positive for explosives this morning, according to airport spokesperson Wayne Shank. Stay with WAVY for the latest.

Kind of terrifying, right?

So I called Wayne Shank, Executive Director of the Norfolk Airport Authority.

Shank started telling me the story: A passenger was “separated” from their package. An “airline employee” picked it up and “left it” on a conveyer belt in the baggage claim area. Airport police deemed the package suspicious. The TSA scanned it, and it tested positive for explosives.

At that point in the conversation a frustrated Shank stopped himself and essentially skipped to the end.

“Let me just tell you, it was nothing,” he said.

Nothing nothing?

“We did an X-ray, opened it. There was nothing in the box,” he said. “It was just a false alarm. And a lot of inconvenience for us.”

Later, Shank identified the “airline employee” as an employee of Delta Airlines.

“I can’t imagine why Delta hasn’t done a better job of training its employees,” he said. “I don’t even know if they’ve identified the employee.”

When I asked him why a test might indicate explosives where there were none, he wasn’t sure.

“That’s a good question I’m going to ask the TSA,” he said. “This is a pretty serious inconvenience. I can’t answer that question, but it’s a good one.”

It sounds as if passengers were relatively un-inconvenienced. People were able to claim their bags outside. It was all resolved in about 90 minutes.

All over a cardboard box.

There are a lot of questions left to be answered with this story. Why wasn’t the Delta employee trained better? Why would these TSA swabs falsely reveal packages as having explosives? What effect will this non-story story have on how comfortable local residents are when flying to and from ORF? And a question I have is, Was WAVY 10 TV’s reporting sensationalized in an unethical way?