It happened during the seventh stage of the Amgen Tour of California, after the racers had already taken off for Mount Diablo Summit. A worker at a salon reported finding a suspicious package.
The bomb squad was called after law enforcement officials determined that a package found in a dumpster was indeed "suspicious."
Law enforcement evacuated a three block area of downtown Livermore while bomb detection devices and investigators canvassed the scene.
In less than an hour, police were able to confirm that it was a package of postcards wrapped and stuffed in a box and then tossed in a dumpster by a vendor.
"It was very suspicious looking," Officer Traci Rebiejo said. "It was, you know, a cardboard box, bound up with a Southern California label on it. We know it wasn't there in the morning and it was placed there sometime during the Amgen and we had to take all the precautions necessary."
More than half the vendors and workers assigned to the Amgen race were cleared from the area as a precaution and the bomb squad was called.
The bomb squad robot took a picture of the package and when that picture was shown to vendors in the area it was identified.
The racers left from here to Mount Diablo Summit. The winner of stage seven was a racer from the Czech Republic.
While the dumpsters were full by late Saturday afternoon, one of the things we learned is that they had been emptied as a safety precaution in the morning. That's why, when that worker noticed something was in the dumpster that hadn't been there earlier, she immediately notified police.
Officials say she , indeed, followed something of "see something, say something."
