Earlier today, the NBC Bay Area reported that sections of Apple Park were evacuated after first responders from Santa Clara County Fire Department had found an envelope with an unknown white substance. Fortunately, the situation is under control now and employees are allowed to return to their offices on the campus.
Currently, Apple’s majority workforce at the Apple Park campus is working remotely since the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020. Employees were scheduled to return to the office in February this year but an increase in cases of COVID-19 omicron variant delayed that plan, indefinitely. With a decline in the number of COVID-19 cases, the company’s CEO Tim Cook said that corporate employees will return to offices by April at its annual shareholders’ meeting held on March 4, 2022.
Apple informs employees that no “hazardous materials” were found on the Cupertino campus
According to its incident report, Santa Clara County Fire Department led a fire alarm and hazmat response at the tech giant HQ in Cupertino, California just after noon local time. It was reported that n Apple Park’s Section 8 was evacuated.
Luckily, within a few hours, emergency personnel declared that the campus was safe for employees to return but did not mention what the discovered substance was.
Later in an email, obtained by The Verge, Apple informed the employees at the campus that authorities did not find any dangerous material in the envelope.
Apple told employees at Apple Park that “authorities concluded that there was no presence of hazardous materials”. The email says that operations at the campus are back to normal, and that “all sections are open.”
Previously, the tech company was granted a restraining order against a potentially violent woman who was stalking Cook for over a year. The alleged woman had trespassed at Cook’s Palo Alto residence in October 2021 and reportedly, she was armed and living in the South Bay Area. The court will hold a hearing on this matter on March 29, 2022. Such incidents raise security concerns for the tech giant’s employees and senior management.
