A small plastic container the size of a shoe box left on a bench near the bandstand at Iolani Palace snarled traffic in downtown Honolulu and led to a closure of the palace grounds for about three hours today.

Members of the Honolulu Police Department’s bomb unit eventually determined that the “suspicious package” was a power pack containing approximately 20 D-cell batteries, said department spokesman Maj. Clayton Kau.
Kau said the device will be turned over to the state Department of Land and Natural Resources as a “found item” and will probably be returned to the owner, if they can be located.
Kau declined to discuss the procedures used by bomb-unit technicians in determining the box was not a threat. But nearly two dozen or so spectators who stood on the makai sidewalk along King Street in front of the downtown Post Office had front-row seats to what looked at times like footage straight out of a television crime drama.
Roger Stucke, who works in a downtown office building, said he first noticed the box at 8:30 a.m. when he was on his way to Starbucks to pick up some coffee.
“It was a blue plastic box, about the size of a shoe box, with a three-prong male plug sticking out of one side and an LCD screen, about one-and-a-half-by-three inches, attached to another side,” Stucke said.
An information technology specialist, Stucke said the box had no markings and was nothing like anything he had seen before.
Stucke said he mentioned the box to a palace groundskeeper who immediately headed toward it.
“I told him, ‘Whatever you do, don’t pick it up.’”
Stucke called police at 8:50 a.m. to report the object.
“I’m very aware of all of the homeland security issues, so I thought it was time for me to practice what I preach,” Stucke said.
The bright blue box sat on a bench about 20 yards away from the makai side of the bandstand for most of the next hour while police and deputy sheriffs shooed pedestrians away from the sidewalk on the palace side of King Street.
A large, blue-and-white police truck showed up on the diamond-head side of the place and unloaded a small, all-terrain robot that began making its way toward the package about 9:45 a.m.
The robot, which is equipped with a video camera, pulled up to within about 5 feet of the box and kept the video camera trained on it for the next hour.
Finally, at about 10:55 a.m., the robot arms were extended, they picked up the box, pulled if off the bench toward the bandstand and dropped it on the ground at the same time state Attorney General Mark Bennett walked by on the sidewalk, his head down, apparently unaware of what was happening on the palace grounds.
At that point, police closed of King Street and rerouted east-bound traffic onto Alakea Street. Lanes on Hotel and Richards street leading to the place were closed as well.
A little past 11:15 p.m., a faded black police bomb disposal truck crept around the diamond head end of the palace and moved slowly toward the bandstand. It climbed up over a curb, moved across the grass and stopped about 20 yards from the box.
A technician covered from head to foot in protective gear got out from the back of the truck, walked up next to the box and knelt beside it. He set what looked like a video or X-ray camera on the ground about 5 feet from the box, stepped away for about 90 seconds and then retrieved the camera before riding away in the back of the truck.
Twenty minutes passed and the bomb truck returned to where the box sat on the ground. This time, two men got out of the truck not wearing protective gear.
They looked closely at the box, took photos of it, picked it up, got into the back of the bomb truck with it and rode in the truck over to the diamond-head side of the palace where the truck was parked.
The palace grounds reopened about 11:40 a.m.
"I had to walk all the way around just to get to the library," said Mario Rodriguez, 51, a Waiçanae resident and mall security guard. "The security was nice about it, but it was a real inconvenience. They had their yellow tape out, and I thought somebody got killed."
Susan Ishida, coordinator of the Royal Hawaiian Band, said it was a minor inconvenience for their scheduled performance that afternoon. "We couldn't really come in and park, we had to drive around." The performance started a little later than they planned.
"We didn't have any problems getting in at all," said Ala Moana resident David Legg. "We just got here five minutes ago. We thought somebody important was going to be here. I guess we missed all the excitement."

Advertiser Staff Writer Katie Urbaszewski contributed to this report.