Five or six Louisiana FBI agents, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office bomb squad, State Police, the St. Charles Parish Sheriff's Office and paramedics all responded to a bomb scare in the Norco chemical complex Monday that turned out to be a misplaced fake explosive used as a training device.The drama unfolded after 09:00 CDT when an employee of Kansas City-Southern Railroad saw a "suspicious" package on Prospect Street near the railroad. The package turned out to be three, 6-inch-long PVC pipes tied together with electrical tape that resembled a pipe bomb, authorities said.

Although near the Shell Chemical plant's east site, the suspected pipe bomb wasn't large enough to affect any of the industrial plants, so they didn't stop operating, said St. Charles Sheriff's Office Maj. Sam Zinna.

Sheriff's deputies shut down Prospect Street for nearly four hours while the Jefferson Parish bomb squad used a water cannon to defuse the device and see what was inside it, Zinna said.

That's when they realized the device wasn't dangerous, Sheriff's Office spokesman Capt. Pat Yoes said.

"It was obviously just a shell," Yoes said, explaining that no explosives were inside. "It was obviously something made to resemble a pipe bomb."

Shell Chemical Co. spokeswoman Lily Acosta Galland said it was a device the plant uses to train security guards for searching under vehicles. "As part of the training they'll put this under the vehicle somewhere," Galland said, adding that guards then try to find the device.

Security officials think the device fell out of one of their security vehicles, but they don't know how long it had been there, Galland said.

Yoes said plant employees identified the device in a photograph as possibly the training device, but they didn't know for sure until after the defusing process. "It was a training device," Yoes said, "and I guess ultimately it gave us some good training."