KIRO NEWSRADIO: SEATTLE NEWS & ANALYSIS
What happens to knives, multi-tools confiscated by TSA at Sea-Tac? They’re sold in Tumwater
Oct 1, 2014, 6:12 PM | Updated: Oct 11, 2024, 10:24 am

Some of the tools confiscated by TSA agents at Sea-Tac (Photo by Rachel Belle)
(Photo by Rachel Belle)
The beauty of being a lady who carries a startlingly huge microphone and has access to a broadcast studio, is that when something frustrating happens to me, say I get seven jars of seriously delicious Italian pesto confiscated from my carry on at the airport, I can do a story on it.
What I wanted to know is: What happens to all of these seized items? So I went down to Sea-Tac Airport to find out.
When TSA pulls a jar of Hawaiian honey or a pocket knife out of your bag, lead Transportation Security Officer, Philip King, says you do have options.
“They can go back out with their property and have that bag checked in. Port of Seattle offers an independent company that would be able to ship it home if they’d like to go back outside and negotiate with that company to have those items shipped to their final destination.”
But most of us don’t do that, so we watch, agitated, as the TSA agent plunks our prohibited item into a bin.
“We’re going to now open up our prohibited items bin,” says TSA spokeswoman, Lorie Dankers. “These are items that passengers have left behind at Security Checkpoint Three, our main checkpoint here at Sea-Tac.”
Dankers says this bin is locked and the key is hard to come by.
“I see tools, any tool over seven inches in not allowed. Very common to see Swiss Army Knives, multi-tools. People often forget these items are in their bag,” says Dankers.
The bin doesn’t include confiscated liquids over 3.4 ounces, bottles of wine, expensive lotions, jars of delicious Italian pesto. All of that stuff is sent to a contractor and destroyed in case it contains a liquid explosive. But all of the knives and screwdrivers, and things like that, are picked up by the Washington State Department of Enterprise Services Surplus Operation.
“We’ll bring [the items] to our location and then we sort the items,” explains program specialist Patrick Clark. “The items that can be sold in the store, they go into the store. We have a store on site that’s open to the public, Tuesday through Friday from 12:30 to 4 p.m. and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The public can come in and shop all of the store items (that) come from a lot of our state agencies.”
That’s right, there’s a store in Tumwater, that’s selling your stuff. Shelley Swetlow sorts through it all and does the pricing.
“A scratched China knife coming in, that’s going to be a dollar, but a Leatherman is going to be $10 to $20,” says Swetlow.
They can’t sell all of your stuff. “We can’t sell anything that’s larger than six inches in length on a blade,” says Swetlow. “We can’t sell nunchuks, brass knuckles. They get put in a box for the police departments that are registered with us because they can use some of those items in their work.”
Swetlow says if there is a name engraved on an item, they will try and get it back to it’s owner.
“The hardest part is if it’s Kyle Smith, I’m not going to be able to find Kyle Smith unless Kyle Smith calls in and requests his item.”
Back at the airport, I ask Dankers why you couldn’t just attach a business card to the confiscated item, and be reunited with it later.
“It’s not TSA’s job to reunite passengers with their items that they’ve brought to the checkpoint, that they shouldn’t have brought. I’d be happy to put some money on it that the bulk of these items could have been put in checked baggage and this would have never happened.”
So, let’s talk about my pesto: It was a sealed jar and I look like a nice person.
“People can often make things look like they haven’t been tampered with,” says Dankers. “We don’t know the history of that item and so we want to make sure that nothing comes through that could be catastrophic to an aircraft. We know that liquids are a major component of an explosive, which is why we don’t allow things through in the larger quantities. We also know that if we were to screen everything, to make sure it’s what the label said it was, the lines would be out onto the sidewalk.”
Dankers wants to remind passengers that all of this is being done to keep them safe when flying the friendly skies.