Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 5, 1990                   TAG: 9003052363
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NOBODY ARRESTED IN THREAT/ BUS SEARCHED; NO BOMB FOUND

The bus, traveling south with about 30 passengers on board, was delayed near Radford for five hours Saturday night and early Sunday while state police searched the bus for a bomb.

State police said the windshield of the coach had been damaged a few minutes earlier by a concrete block dropped on the vehicle from an overpass in Christiansburg.

A threat that a bomb was on the bus was received by Roanoke police shortly before 11 p.m. Saturday, according to Trooper Roy Bolen.

Soon afterward, state police stopped the bus off Exit 34 along Interstate 81 near Radford and evacuated all the passengers.

Bolen said a Montgomery County school bus was brought for the passengers to wait in while authorities searched the Greyhound. Montgomery deputies and Radford police assisted in the search.

About 4 a.m., after authorities and a state police bomb-sniffing dog from Appomattox had found no explosives, the passengers were returned to the bus.

The bomb threat and damaged windshield came at the end of the second day of a national strike against Greyhound Lines Inc. by the Amalgamated Council of Greyhound Local Unions.

In Roanoke, about a dozen strikers were on the picket line Sunday night when a bus pulled into the Roanoke terminal.

The strikers were angered by the way the bus had been driven across the picket line. Most buses, they said, have edged across the line and slowly passed by the strikers.

This driver, however, accelerated as he approached the picket line and honked the horn as he pulled into the terminal. Union members pounded the bus with their fists as it passed and heckled the driver as he got off the bus.

Tommy Mullins, international vice president for the Amalgamated Council of Greyhound Local Unions, was in Roanoke to support the strikers. He lives in Roanoke and is on leave while he is working for the union.

"If any of these men or women had fallen down in front of the bus, he would have crushed them. He never would have seen them," he said of the replacement driver.