Durango police were called to Denny's Restaurant by an employee who saw a suspicious package in the parking lot about 1 p.m. Sunday.
Sgt. David Longenette of the Durango Police Department said a backpack was found along a cinderblock wall around the trash bins.
Later that afternoon, the Farmington Police Department Bomb Squad found the backpack with electronic components attached to the outside making it appear to be a bomb. But the device contained no explosives.
The response team used a remotely operated vehicle armed with five cameras, lights, a weapons arm and a claw arm to evaluate the puzzling device.
“These days, we don't take chances on anything,” said Bomb Squad Commander Steve Smith. “We treat these things as a worse-case scenario until we can determine otherwise.”
Detective Burke Baldwin of the Durango Police Department, said, “They certainly went to a lot of trouble to make it look like something interesting.”
The robot for the job, nicknamed “Flash,” was a small, highly maneuverable mechanism, “good for situations like this,” said Smith, capable of dousing the device with water of even firing shot into it if necessary, to disrupt or break up the components.
“We support Durango, so they call us, and we get somebody up there right away,” Smith said.
Denny's employee Rovanna Johanneck said the restaurant was at full capacity of 147 people when the police initiated an evacuation early Sunday afternoon.
“It was calm,” she said. “They just came in and said, 'As a safety precaution, we have a suspicious package and need to evacuate.' There was food still sitting in the windows and everything.”
Johanneck caught a clear look of the backpack before leaving the restaurant grounds.
“It had wires coming out of it and a motor at the bottom,” she said, “and a cellphone with tape wrapped around it and some batteries. Whether it is something or not, we don't know, but they thought it was worth calling the bomb squad.”
Denny's, as well as the Giant gasoline station at College Avenue and Camino del Rio, were temporarily evacuated, but by 4:30 p.m., Denny's once again was seating diners.
Early Sunday afternoon, traffic was blocked on Seventh Street from Camino del Rio to Narrow Gauge Avenue while law enforcement on scene waited for the Farmington Bomb Squad's arrival.
The nearby Transit Center and Post Office were closed, but police allowed people into the Post Office to pick up mail from post office boxes.
bmathis@durangoherald.com
