Police and fire responded Monday afternoon to an office complex in Bellevue where workers evacuated after someone opened an envelope containing white powder.
The incident took place around 12:27 p.m. at an IRS office at 520 112th Avenue Northeast. The call came roughly 11 minutes before a similar incident occurred at a courthouse in Seattle.
CNN reports that Bellevue and Seattle are among at least six sites in the Pacific Northwest where suspicious substances were found in envelopes at federal buildings. The other locations were the FBI office in Spokane, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boise, the FBI building in Coeur d’Alene, and the FBI office in Pocatello, Idaho.
According to Lt. Eric Keenan of the Bellevue Fire Department, a person in the Bellevue IRS building opened an envelope, and an unknown white powder blew into the air. The person exposed received treatment on site and was transported to a medical facility.
Bellevue firefighters suited up two more office employees with haz-mat suits after determining they may have been exposed. The coverings were meant to contain any of the suspicious substance that may have contacted their bodies, according to Keenan.
Bellevue police spokeswoman Carla Iafrate said the pair would likely be transported to a medical facility for evaluation.
The envelope containing the unknown substance will remain in the building until further testing is done. The message in the envelope, if any, is unknown at this time.
Authorities were uncertain about the makeup of the suspicious substance at the time of this report.
“We can tell what it’s not, but we can’t really tell what it is especially if it is a true biohazard,” Keenan said. “The substances that are typically powder born, such as the big one being Anthrax which is a biological agent, takes microscopes and sophisticated lab equipment to figure out. If it’s a chemical substance like baking soda, we can typically figure out what that is with our instrumentation.”
The Eastside Hazardous Materials Response Team was set to enter the building to do initial testing on the substance and gather a sampling to send to a crime lab in Shoreline.
“If the substance is baking soda, we will be able to tell, but depending on how sophisticated this person is who sent the package, you can mix a biological agent with a known agent to try to fool us,” Keenan explained. “You never know until it’s professionally analyzed at the crime lab.”
Federal agents from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security were at the scene in Bellevue to investigate the mailing.
The four-story complex where the Bellevue IRS office is located contains 40,000 square-foot of office space, and is home to Frontier Bank employees as well. The IRS uses the third floor. One floor at the complex is mostly vacant, according to the building manager.
The federal courthouse in Seattle was not evacuated Monday, but the basement mail room was quarantined.
The Bellevue Reporter will provide regular updates at this site as the story evolves.
Reporter Joshua Adam Hicks contributed to this report
