By Scott Taylor,Staff Writer

Local bus officials say they were prepared for a bomb threat that disrupted the Citylink bus service for about an hour Friday.

A local radio station received an anonymous call at about 11:22 a.m. Friday urging people to “watch the news tonight for a bus to be blown up by a bunch of white boys.” That threat convinced bus company officials to shut the system down for about 90 minutes Friday.

State and county emergency officials had already started looking at safety guidelines after the July 7 bombings in London and Friday’s response was part of that protocol.

“Since those involved transit systems, we were encouraged to really look at our local transit systems,” said Timothy Bubier, deputy director of the Androscoggin County Emergency Management Agency. The agency staff had just gone over safety guidelines for buses last week when the bomb threat was phoned in.

Radio station employees notified Auburn Police, who notified Western Maine Transit. Western Maine had all buses meet at Great Falls Plaza in Auburn for an inspection. The inspectors didn’t find anything and the buses were all returned to service by 1 p.m.

“The most important thing from our standpoint was making sure the passengers were safe,” said Marsha Bennett, transit coordinator for the Androscoggin Transportation Resource Center, which manages the Citylink bus system and hired Western Maine to operate it.

Bennett said she was also pleased at how quickly Western Maine got the buses back on the road.

“I think they did pretty good for never having had to deal with something like this before,” Bennett said.

Bennett said she plans to meet with local emergency officials to talk about what happened and how it was handled.

“We’re hoping that we can get something good out of something that caused a lot of stress and anxiety,” Bennett said. “We know that there were passengers left waiting and those evacuated were not happy about having to wait. But now, it’s time to look back and see how we handled everything and get some expert input.”