A battered pink bag used by workers in baggage claim sparked a security scare at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on Tuesday, becoming the latest sign of these suddenly jittery times in airline travel.

For the meantime, travelers may just have to get used to it as the industry grapples with increased security in the wake of the failed Christmas Day attempt to bomb Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

"I think that we're going to continue to have these scares -- it comes with the territory," said consumer travel expert Chris Elliott. "Everyone got jumpy after 9/11, then after the liquid gel scare. The same thing is happening now. Everyone is very jumpy."

The 90-minute evacuation of parts of the Lindbergh Terminal came hours after an airport in California was shut down when suspicious material was found inside luggage. It turned out to be five soft drink bottles filled with honey. On Sunday, a man breached security at Newark Liberty International Airport, resulting in major delays and grounding flights for six hours.

On Tuesday afternoon at the Twin Cities airport, a bomb-sniffing dog reacted as though something suspicious was on the bag, which is used to mark the end of a line of luggage from a flight, at carousel No. 12, which is used by Continental and Frontier airlines.

About half of the airport's baggage-claim area was closed off, as were ticketing areas above, starting at about 2 p.m. A portion of the roadway closest to those areas was also shut down, creating a traffic back-up into the airport.

The areas were re-opened at around 3:30 p.m. after members of the Bloomington Police Department's bomb squad determined it was a false alarm.

Jordley Peral, 16, of Apple Valley had just flown in from Chicago and was looking to retrieve his bags near carousel 12 when airport officials stopped everyone, told them not to retrieve their bags and to wait along the wide baggage claim corridor. They weren't allowed to leave.

Though officials remained calm, word began to spread that a bomb had been detected, Peral said afterward. He and dozens of others waited calmly, though some edginess was present after word spread of other supposed incidents.

"I was a little bit nervous," he said, adding that it was hard to know what was going on.

Cari Holley, 32, of Minneapolis, who had just arrived on a flight from Dallas with her two children, ages 4 and 6, said she's willing to put up with such disruptions in the interest of safety. "I think it's important -- anything they need to do to protect flights, absolutely," she said. "Whatever they need to do to protect us."

Her uncle, Bill Brueggeman of St. Louis Park, who was picking her up, said there will be some "hair-trigger reactions" in the wake of the Christmas Day attempt but said it's better to be safe than sorry.

"Until there's some level of confidence that they know what they're dealing with, I think we're going to wind up dealing with these things over and over again," he said.

Security steps are the same

Airport spokesman Pat Hogan said the airport followed the same protocol that has been in place since well before Christmas Day. "Any time an explosive-detection canine responds to something in the terminal, we would follow the same steps in terms of evacuating a portion of the area to ensure that everyone is safe, and contact the bomb squad."

The bag is what's known as the "last bag," he said, and is used by handlers unloading the bags from arriving planes to signify that all the bags have been moved through.

Officials probably will never figure out what the dog smelled on it, he said, noting that the substances that the dogs are trained to react to are classified.

"There was just something on the bag that the dog was trained to respond to that it did," Hogan said. "It was a case of the dogs doing what they're supposed to do."

Asked if the practice of using such a bag would end because of this, Hogan said he didn't think so. But, "this particular bag won't be used again."

The six Transportation Security Administration dogs at MSP work around the clock, but the airport has made sure they are out "as much as possible" following the NWA Flight 253 incident, he said.

Traces of explosives in California

Hogan said that the last time this happened was about four years ago, when a dog smelled something on a vending machine and an ATM, and that too, was a false alarm. Officials were able to keep the airport operating with only minimal delays, he said.

In California, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said the bottles, found inside a checked bag at Bakersfield's Meadows Field, tested positive for traces of an explosive. He said investigators are trying to determine whether there was something in the honey or on the bag that triggered security alarms before 7:30 a.m. Tuesday.

Elliott, the consumer travel expert, predicted things will soon return to normal, barring any kind of successful attack. "People will calm down after a while, and the false alarms won't make the news."

The Associated Press and staff writers Jim Foti and Bob von Sternberg contributed to this report. Abby Simons • 612-673-4921 Suzanne Ziegler • 612-673-1707