okay. erin cohen, are you there? okay. i m going to ask my control room to see if we can find aaron cohen. he is somebody who has worked on counterterrorism. he can give us a sense of what police are probably doing right now to try and deal with this. this is a densely populated suburb of washington, d.c., silver spring, maryland. anybody in the d.c. area will know it very well. you ll know this building very well. it s a densely populated suburb and it s a, as you can see from the buildings around there, mostly office buildings and police have evacuated the discovery channel headquarters, which is the one we re looking at right now. apparently they have not evacuated buildings in the vicinity. but streets have been closed off, access to the roads in the neighborhood have been closed off. maybe we can get a different shot of this by going to the newsroom. josh levs is there. josh, what are you finding out
it s somebody who s trying to make it seem like he has an explosive or it s somebody who does have an explosive and is trained in improvised explosive devices, which is what this tank would seem like. either that or he s using some type of oxygen respirator in order to breathe oxygen in the event the building is burned down aaron, let me interrupt you for a second. let s go to a press conference. right now, it s still very fluid. what about employees in the building? i ve talked to some employees who were told to take cover, to lock themselves into offices and then they were told they could leave the building. do you have most of the employees out or are there still some employees in there? i don t know about how many employees are still there and how many have been out of the building. does this man have hostages? i don t know that. is he still in the lobby of the building? we re speaking with him now. he s in the building. is he in a known place to you?
i really a p.a. announcement. there always seemed to be people around us who knew what to do and were up on the most recent updates telling us where to go. it was orderly. it was orderly. and you have no reason there s nothing that you know of that would make somebody want to do this, right? you don t come up against this a lot in your line of work? that s correct. this is the first time that i have ever encountered anything like this. i had heard rumors that the person who is the person with the explosives taped to his chest is someone who s mentally unstable and i know last year he organized some sort of against discovery and he [ inaudible ]. i ve heard rumors it s the same person. we don t have much information, as these cases often go. there s a lot flying around which we don t have yet from the police.
what type of weapons they re carrying. and s.w.a.t. teams typically train for the worst case scenario. they don t want to go in to this situation with their weapons and have to flush this guy out. but if they have to, they will. and that s what they re trained to do. so that tac unit is working very closely with those sharpshooters and with the command team. everybody s having a nice, close look at this situation. hopefully, like i said, they ll be able to keep this thing nice and calm and come to some type of resolution which is really the goal of that law enforcement agency or with any good agency. at the moment, what we know is that we haven t seen any developments on the ground. everything, as you said, does seem to have been put into a holding pattern. this business about tanks on the back, this is information that was given to a news organization by somebody who came out of the building. what do you make of that, aaron, tanks? i make two things either
to the scenement they re on site now, i would imagine. the fire marshals there are the explosive experts. they are trying to determine what that device is, whether it s explosive or not. we don t know that it is an explosive device. but they do seem to think that they are tanks. now, as far as police know, he s not fired any weapons. but we have heard that he appears to have a revolver on him. initial call that came in were that shots were fired. that s everything we know at the moment. i ve got michelle forman on the phone. she is across the street in a building on the seventh floor, had a better vantage point of this than we do from here. michelle, any developments since we last spoke? not really. every now and then, the officers will shift or move. but there has been we haven t seen anything. erin cohen, are you on the phone? erin?