Surveillance footage released by the TSA shows the moment a smouldering bag was quickly moved away from a passenger line by a level-headed TSA officer.
The incident, which occurred at the Orlando airport late Friday afternoon and captured on video, shows TSA officer Ricardo Perez grabbing the smoking bag and placing it between two pillars in a brave attempt to avert disaster.
“I leaned over, grabbed it, picked it up,” Perez told ABC-13 Orlando. “I was already close, so if there was an IED, I was already gone. So I might as well try to save as many as I can.”
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Afterwards, it turned out the smoke was coming from an exploded battery but the TSA says Perez should be credited nonetheless.
“That doesn’t make his act any less heroic. Kudos to this veteran,” it said in a statement.
The event caused a panic at the airport and major travel delays as a full ground stop was issued at 5:30 p.m. and not lifted until 9 p.m., the Orlando Sentinel reported.
“It was pandemonium,” Mike Robinson told the Orlando Sentinel.
“Now they’re bringing people out of their gates, off-loading them to be screened again,” Robinson said. “There’s thousands and thousands of people … I look back and I see a sea of people.”
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