A bomb at an ethanol plant in Peoria necessitated many evacuations, and police are still searching the area.
The bomb was discovered Friday, the third in a triplet of disasters that included the national ground stop for airplanes due to system malfunctions and the tanker crash that capsized a riverboat in New Orleans.
A bomb found near an industrial building in Peoria, Illinois, necessitated all residents in a 1-mile radius to immediately evacuate, authorities said. The device has been rendered safe, an official says, but police are still searching the area. https://t.co/EVFn73hR5R
— CBS News (@CBSNews) November 14, 2026
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A suspicious package was near a BioUrja ethanol plant in the afternoon of November 13, and police decided some hours later it was a "credible threat,” according to CBS News.
"Notifications were sent out with an evacuation order in the one-mile blast radius" from the BioUrja facility, police chief Brad Dixon said early Saturday.
Dixon added the package was "rendered safe" at 9:12 p.m., but searches continued for other possible devices throughout the wider area… FBI Special Agent Ryan Presley told reporters his office deployed personnel to work alongside the Peoria Police Department, Peoria Fire Department, Peoria County Sheriff's Department, the Illinois Secretary of State's Office and Illinois State Police.
Dixon said that more searching was needed to confirm that BioUrja itself was safe, because authorities don’t know if there was more than one bomb. There was no public information about a possible suspect as of early Saturday morning. “We are currently investigating this incident with all of our partners. While it is early in the investigation, know this: we will work tirelessly to identify the individual responsible and bring them to justice,” Presley said.
Of course, we do not yet know whether the bomb came from a domestic or a foreign terrorist. Also, the Trump administration seems more inclined to blame faulty systems than a cyberattack for the nationwide ground stop of airplanes. But we cannot forget that the Iranian regime has threatened significant cyberattacks and other disruptions due to agents they already have in position across our country. Multiple top administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, have had to move to more secure locations — even military bases — because of assassination plots from Iran.
There’s also the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has been waging asymmetric warfare against us for years. This is the tragedy of not taking either foreign or domestic enemies seriously enough, because after the midterm elections, they are greatly emboldened.
At any given time in American history, somewhere between a third and half of the country has actively hated freedom and equal rights for everyone. And the political left, from the days of Aaron Burr up through the present, has always believed in violence to attain its ends. We have so many enemies that, when a bomb incident occurs, one never knows who is responsible for it.