Bomb Squad?

I'm working on a script for a web series that was inspired by the recent collar-bomb scare in Australia (it's not really based on that incident, other than that the bomb turns out to be fake, but that's what got me thinking about this).

Basically, a girl wakes up in a strange motel with a bomb strapped to her waist. She has no idea how she got there, or who might be responsible for this. There's a note, but it doesn't really provide any clues, and basically dares the police to even try to disarm it.

Now, in the end, the bomb is a fake, but it looks realistic enough (the guy who created it was a former military explosives expert) that they're not taking any chances.

So, I guess I need to know what the procedure would be for dealing with this kind of thing. First, it's not set in a big city, but more of a large town, so it's not like the bomb squad sees a whole lot of action (also, they're coming in from all over the region, it's not like there's a single bomb squad unit based in one location; that part is based on the way the bomb squad is set up in my state). The main guy in the story is also former military, and dealt with explosives in Iraq. So he knows what he's doing, but the rest of the guys on the bomb squad have little to no real-world experience with anything even close to this sophisticated (other than standard training).

As it stands now, I've basically got it where the motel has been evacuated, and the bomb squad guy is in the room. What would he do next? I'm guessing he'll try to take a close look at the device without actually touching anything. Or would he even go in by himself if the ETA for any other bomb squad members was an hour or two?

So he checks out this device, and is having a very hard time figuring out where to even start with disarming it. At some point, though, he's going to start to suspect that this device is fake (also, any help in something that might tip him off to this without being obvious right away would be helpful). What would he do at that point? I mean, if it turns out to be fake, then he can just remove it. But what if he's wrong? What would the procedure be at that point?

Any insight at all (or even direction toward resources/books/websites/etc.) would be really helpful at this point. Thanks in advance!

Great replies so far. Definitely giving me some things to think about.

Becky Black said:

I'd think he'd go in to examine the device as soon as he can, because of the fact it's attached to a person. If it was just sitting someplace and the area had been evacuated, then sure, wait until the rest of the squad show up with robots, sniffer dogs etc. But with a person in immediate danger would he really just wait on the sidelines?

At this point he doesn't know it's going to be especially hard to defuse the bomb. It could be relatively easy. It could be an obvious fake. But he can't know until he looks. Is he going to leave an innocent person to suffer for another hour and maybe get blown up if he might be able to have it sorted in five minutes? The people who work bomb disposal aren't exactly scaredy cats and saving lives is ingrained deep into them.

Also, just dramatically, if he's an MC and you want the audience to like him, then no matter how sensible it might be for him to wait for the rest of the squad, the audience may well despise him for it. But if he risks his life for someone else, goes beyond the call of duty, they'll love him for it.

It can also be more dramatic with just him against the bomb, rather than a whole team of people. It focuses the tension tight onto just these two people.

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That was my thought, too. At this point, he's definitely going straight in as soon as he gets to the scene. He's off-duty when it happens, so it takes him some time to get there, and he instructs the other cops on the scene who responded first to get the place evacuated and locked down. It takes awhile before any of the other bomb squad gets there, including the head of the squad.

So here's an add-on question: do most bomb squads, especially those that might be in a small town or region that doesn't see much of this kind of thing have an EOD suit (like the one in The Hurt Locker)? I know they're expensive ($18k+), so I would think it might not be something they'd have, or at least not something that each member would have.

I'm thinking at some point I'm going to need to actually send an email to the bomb squad commander in my state and see if he can give me any info. But I also know they're not exactly forthcoming with a lot of information about tactics, etc., since they don't want people to really know what kinds of tools they have available to them.