Hazmat deployed to Utah IRS building.

[SirNitram]

Link

OGDEN, Utah - Hazardous materials crews and the FBI were on the scene Monday at the IRS building in Ogden, Utah, where several people were subjected to decontamination showers.

Two people were taken out of the building on stretchers for “medical emergencies,” but their conditions “do not appear to be related to this incident,” said the the FBI, which is leading the investigation. It released no further details.

The IRS confirmed that “an unknown substance” was discovered but also gave no further details. Local news reports suggested that a suspicious white powder may have been found in mail delivered to the facility.

Initial reports said the buiding was in Farr West, a small community near Ogden, but the IRS specified that the incident took place at the IRS campus on Rulon White Boulevard in Ogden, about 30 miles from Salt Lake City.

The incident began about 12:30 p.m. (2:30 p.m. ET) Monday, 11 days after a Texas man embroiled in a years-long dispute with the IRS crashed his small plane into the agency’s complex in Austin, Texas.

While nothing is proven yet, I can't help but think of the suicide bomber in Texas.

[Isolder74]

Perfect, just perfect. I live in Odgen.

I hope that it wasn't anything worse then a gas leak or something similar.

[jcow79]

This actually isn't all that uncommon in that building or any of the other IRS buildings that directly receive mailed documents I'd imagine. I worked for a short period in their Clearfield UT archive and we received a few memo's about envelopes containing "unidentified powder" showing up in that location.

I don't know how often that the FBI and hazmat showed up though. I didn't work in the building mentioned specifically. All the documents we handled were screened by the people working in that building. But we heard about it when it happened.

I worked there prior to the anthrax mailings of 2001. I’ll bet these instances are treated very seriously now.

[ShadowDragon8685]

KSL (found the link on CNN) is stressing that the two employees taken out on stretchers had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the mysterious substance.


What are the odds that some asshole will mail baking soda to the IRS?... I'd be more surprised if that didn't happen daily. But what're the odds two people would be taken out from completely unrelated reasons coincdentally?

It seems unlikely, unless they're both sensitive to the same thing that can trigger an attack. For instance, if I catch even a whiff of cigarette smoke I start to feel bad - if someone's actually smoking around me, I am compelled to leave by the fastest means available to me lest I wind up in a full-blown chest-clutching, lung-coughing asthma attack.

Could it be two people with, say, a peanut allergy accidentally exposed to peanuts, or two people with a shellfish allergy exposed to (I think it's Iodine?) the element in shellfish that sets off anaphlyxis?

While it might not be terribly likely that two people with the same allergy work in the same place, it's hardly impossible, either. If they work together, an accidental exposure that could get one would easily stand a good chance of getting both, and anaphlyxis is a serious enough medical emergency to all out the EMTs. If someone found an envelope of baking soda at the same time, well, it's easy to see how that could cause a lot of bricks to be expelled from many a sphincter.

Of course, this is all supposing that it was actually a coincidence and not, in fact, another act of home-grown terrorism... Though I think it's unlikely that they'll dismantle the USPS, it could (sadly) be the start of something more.

What are the chances Joe Stack's kamikaze run is going to inspire others with a grudge against the IRS to go off the deep end? Nobody's thrilled about the tax man (and even less when the tax man's surviving wife sues the surviving wife of the lunatic,) but it would still suck major if this was the beginning of a storm of attacks on the IRS.

[Mayabird]

Or they could've just panicked and gotten chest pains and the paramedics thought it better to be safe than sorry.
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[Knife]

Perfect, just perfect. I live in Odgen.

I hope that it wasn't anything worse then a gas leak or something similar.

Well hell, half my extended family work out there and I'm just learning about this?