generally a ton of traffic. there s a large pedestrian mall immediately across the street with lots of shopping and restaurants and things. particularly during the business day, this area is just buzzing with people. so it is and with traffic. georgia avenue is a main road into michelle, i m going to interrupt you just to give you the basics that we know about the situation for viewers who are joining us. you re looking at the discovery channel headquarters. this is in silver spring, maryland. what we understand from police is that there s a hostage situation under way. one man apparently, the police have visuals of him in the lobby of the discovery building. he appears to have a device on him. police say that the device appears to be tanks and that he is armed. they seem to see a revolver. they re looking at him on closed circuit tv. and fire marshal experts and explosives have been called in to try and help identify the
but we re trying to get as much information as possibly. you re looking at the discovery building in silver spring, maryland. right now, right outside of washington, d.c., there s a hostage situation in there. lori, thank you very much for the information that you ve brought us today. i want to just check with kelly. do we have sabina on the phone? we re working on somebody else whose husband was in the building and she s been in communication with him. but we do believe as far as we know, the police were not able to confirm that there s anybody else in that building or tell us that everybody s out of the building. we do know that the building was evacuated. what we just heard from lori who works in the building was that she and other workers got an e-mail. they had people who were sort of in touch with them and she saw everybody getting out of the building or at least she saw people getting out of the building. unable to confirm whether everybody is out of the building. they were no
we understand the police have a visual of this man who may be holding somebody hostage and may have some kind of a device on him. does it appear obvious to you from what you can see that police are concentrating on a particular part of the building? are they looking anywhere? do you see anything that looks like activity? i can only see two corners of the building. and there are definitely police concentrated at the main entrance, which is at georgia avenue and wayne. right. that is certainly where there are more police officers. the officers had their hands on their guns the entire time focused on the main lobby of the building. it s all windows. i cannot see i can just barely see into that lobby. i don t see anything. but if there s somebody in that lobby, then the officers on this end should absolutely be able to see them. and you see what appear to be s.w.a.t. team or emergency service units, something like that?
that s what they ve told us. they have ordered an evacuation of the building. again, we know that he has one person with him. we don t know whether there are any more hostages and don t know whether there are people still in the offices in that building who were not able to observe the evacuation order because they felt endangered. we don t know where in the building he is. what we know is what you know right now, the building has been evacuated or at least ordered evacuated. we are we want to just go to the phone right now. we ve got somebody who is michelle foreman is with me on the phone. michelle, are you there? yes, i m here. you re in a building across the road? yeah, i m with the association of public health laboratories. and ou office is on the seventh floor in the building immediately across the street. okay. immediately across the street. do you know which direction so we can see what we re talking about here? i guess, we face on georgia
to come out and it sounds to me like they re in this holding pattern which hopefully is the situation. and it also sounds like to me like the emergency plans for that surrounding area have been affected accordingly which which is to get everybody out of that area. let me tell you what we know about that. thank you for bringing that up. let me tell you what we know. right now, you re looking at the discovery building, the discovery channel headquarters in silver spring, maryland. the roads around it have all been closed. we understand that that building has been evacuated. there is somebody in that building with a weapon and something on them that police think might be a tank or tanks and apparently he has one hostage. that s what we re looking at right now. we believe that hostage to be in the lobby. aaron, let me ask you this, you said you don t want to give anything away. i don t think we would if we said it is almost always at the interest of the authorities to make to establish