DENVER (Reuters) – A busy shopping mall near Columbine High School was evacuated on Wednesday after authorities responding to a small fire at the retail complex found two propane tanks and a pipe bomb, officials said.

Twelve years to the day after two Columbine High School students shot dead a teacher, 12 students and themselves on April 20, 1999, the devices were discovered at Southwest Plaza Mall, about a mile from Columbine.

Jacki Kelley, spokeswoman for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, said the security scare began when a small blaze broke out in the mall's food court around noon on Wednesday.

Firefighters arriving on the scene discovered the propane tanks "at the origin of the fire," and police ordered an estimated 10,000 shoppers and mall employees out of the complex, Kelley said.

Bomb squads later uncovered the pipe bomb nearby as they combed through the sprawling plaza with explosives-detecting dogs, she said.

Among the arsenal that Columbine assailants Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris brought to school during their assault in 1999 were pipe bombs and propane tanks fashioned into bombs.

The similarity of devices found at the mall to the explosives in the school attack was not lost on investigators, Kelley said.

"It's very disturbing that this happened today of all days," Kelley said.

FBI agents called to the scene were treating the bomb placements as "a case of domestic terrorism," Kelley said.

FBI spokesman Dave Joly later told reporters that investigators believe the pipe bomb was intended to trigger a larger explosion of the propane tanks.

Kelley said the bomb fell apart while explosives technicians were handling the device as they prepared to detonate it, and it was "rendered safe."

Investigators reviewed videotapes from surveillance cameras for clues, and later released two still images from the tapes showing a gray-haired man with a mustache and baseball cap they described as a "person of interest."

The FBI asked for the public's help in locating the unidentified man, who was captured in one photo near a door by a stairwell, carrying a plastic grocery bag in one hand.

Columbine cancels classes each year on the anniversary of the massacre there. But other schools in the area were placed on lock-down during Wednesday's bomb scare at the mall as a precaution until the all-clear was given, Kelley said.

The mall will remain closed until the investigation is complete.

Discovery of the pipe bomb came a day after police in Colorado Springs, about 50 miles to the southeast, confronted a teenage boy who admitted posting "Columbine-style threats" against his high school on his Facebook account.

A police spokesman said the Palmer High School ninth grader told officers who visited his home Tuesday that the threats were meant as a joke, and he apologized, along with his family.

The student, whose name was not released, also agreed to stay home from school on Wednesday. Police patrols and security at the school were stepped up for the day, police said.

(Reporting by Keith Coffman and Steve Gorman; Editing by Dan Whitcomb, Greg McCune)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration has full confidence in the top U.S. aviation safety official and his agency following a string of highly publicized lapses by air traffic controllers, including one this week involving a plane carrying first lady Michelle Obama.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told Reuters on the sidelines of a transportation conference on Wednesday that he supports Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Randy Babbitt "1,000 percent."

He also said he saw no need for an independent review of the FAA's performance beyond the investigations already under way.

LaHood said the FAA has started nine investigations into embarrassing disclosures of controllers sleeping on the job and other safety-related incidents and is working as quickly as possible to find out what went wrong in each case.

"We are doing a top-to-bottom review," LaHood said. "We think we're looking into this as thoroughly as we possibly can."

On the PBS "NewsHour" program, LaHood said the FAA had fired two controllers who had been on suspension --including one who had been sleeping on the job in Knoxville, Tennessee.

"A controller actually made a bed in the control tower, brought a pillow, brought blankets, he's been fired," he said. "We're not going to sit by and let that kind of behavior take place in control towers."

A second controller, in Miami, was violating procedures by directing a 737 to fly too closely to a smaller plane to monitor it, LaHood said.

Hank Krakowski, the FAA official in charge of day-to-day operations involving the nation's 15,000 air traffic controllers, resigned last week over the uproar accompanying disclosures of controllers sleeping on the job in several locations, including Washington.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is also looking into controller errors and fatigue. The board, which is an independent agency, said on Wednesday it would investigate Monday's incident involving Michelle Obama's jet.

Representative John Mica, chairman of the House of Representatives Transportation Committee, told Reuters in a separate interview that he also supported Babbitt, a former airline pilot and financial consultant who took the job in 2009.

"He still has my confidence," Mica said. "I think he inherited a mess and he's trying to sort through it."

LaHood said he had not spoken with the White House about the latest mishap involving a government jet carrying Mrs. Obama and Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joe Biden, on a flight from New York.

NEW POLICY

The first lady's plane was ordered to abandon its landing approach to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington after controllers at a Virginia radar center allowed the Boeing 737 to get too close to a military cargo plane flying about 3 miles ahead.

There was a concern that the lumbering Air Force C-17 would not clear the runway before Mrs Obama's plane, the next in line on the approach path, was ready to land.

The Boeing jet made a series of subtle maneuvers before making a new approach without incident. Neither plane was ever in any imminent danger and both landed safely, the FAA said.

The mistake, called an operational error, is not uncommon and usually they are corrected easily and quickly with little, if any, outside notice.

(Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Jackie Frank)

GRAND ISLE, Louisiana (Reuters) – A year after the worst U.S. offshore oil spill swamped the Gulf coast with petroleum and misery, officials on Wednesday declared the hard-hit region reborn.

It is still too early to know the long-term damage to the Gulf's rich and complex ecosystem. But, so far, predictions made at the height of the spill of an impending environmental Armageddon appear well overstated.

"We're inviting America to come down here, have a great time, enjoy our seafood and be part of the greatest rebirth you will ever see," said Louisiana's Republican Governor Bobby Jindal at a ceremony to mark the event's anniversary.

An explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April 20, 2010, killed 11 workers and released nearly 5 million barrels of oil that fouled the shorelines of four Gulf Coast states.

Louisiana bore the brunt of the BP Plc spill's damage -- about 650 miles of its coastline were oiled, versus 174 miles in Florida, 159 miles in Mississippi and 90 miles in Alabama.

On Grand Isle, a barrier island at the mouth of Barataria Bay which was heavily oiled, business is returning to normal after the spill shut down fisheries and caused widespread economic damage.

"Everything's opening up again now," said J.T. Hood, a retired offshore platform worker who came down from Donaldson, La., for some offshore fishing. "I can't wait to get back out there." When Hood's son, a commercial fisherman, ventured out recently, he had a respectable haul.

"By 10 a.m. he had 75 speckled trout," Hood said.

Nearby, local TV chef Kevin Diez whipped up the region's signature seafood dish -- shrimp etouffee - made with the famous Gulf crustacean.

The scene was a far cry from the early days of the spill when there were images of oiled pelicans and the undersea "spill cam" dominated the media. Then, environmentalists warned of the death of the Gulf Coast's fisheries and said that undersea currents threatened to carry the oil to the shores of the United Kingdom and beyond.

"The greatest environmental disaster with no end in sight!" a group called Seize BP, an advocacy group that gathered petitions to ask the federal government to seize BP's assets, said in a statement in May 2010. "Millions of gallons of oil gushing for months (and possibly years) to come. Jobs vanishing. Creatures dying."

To be sure, in places like Bay Jimmy and Barataria Bay, the oil lingers in the form of brownish, sometimes caramel-colored tar and there are dead or dying marsh grasses.

There are also perhaps millions of barrels of oil lingering beneath the ocean surface, according to federal government estimates. The effect of that oil on life in the sea are still largely unknown.

NO EXXON VALDEZ

But the spill's effects are far less serious than the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, which soaked Alaska's environmentally fragile coast in heavy oil, said Edward Overton, an ecologist and professor emeritus at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

"I think it's too early to tell, but I am extremely optimistic," Overton said. "We're way off what Exxon Valdez was, way off."

In Florida, where the oil spill cost the state's tourist-dependent economy more than $1 billion, officials were eager to tout their hotels, restaurants and resorts.

"Bookings are up and our beaches are spotless," Florida Gov. Rick Scott declared after touring Destin's white-sand beaches. "The fishing is good and the seafood tastes great."

But across the Gulf Coast, residents who still feel the spill's impact fear they will be abandoned by BP and an army of contractors who swarmed over the coast in the largest oil-spill response in U.S. history, involving nearly 50,000 workers and 7,000 offshore vessels at its height.

"Oil is still washing up on our beaches and on the islands. Now that the media is gone, the BP effort has all but disappeared and so has our livelihood," said Craig Moore, a charter boat captain in Long Beach, Mississippi.

President Barack Obama, who was criticized as reacting too slowly to the spill, said the government will keep pressure on BP, and that "the job isn't done."

"We continue to hold BP and other responsible parties fully accountable for the damage they've done and the painful losses that they've caused," Obama said in a statement.

BP has paid out about $5 billion in claims for economic losses through a spill fund administered by Washington attorney Kenneth Feinberg. The spill wiped about $70 billion from BP's market value and spurred it to replace its gaffe-prone British chief executive with an American, Bob Dudley.

"At BP we regret that the accident happened and the impact it has had on the environment of the Gulf Coast and the people living there," Dudley wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

Also in separate actions on Wednesday, BP sued Transocean, the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon rig, seeking at least $40 million in damages, and Cameron International Corp, the maker of the blowout preventer, the fail-safe device that failed to automatically shut down BP's Macondo well.

The lawsuits filed in New Orleans federal court accuse both companies of negligence.

Transocean said the suit was "specious and unconscionable."

"This is the latest desperate bid by BP to turn its back on the agreement they made with Transocean to assume full responsibility for the costs and liability of any pollution, contamination and environmental damage caused by hydrocarbons that leaked from the Macondo well," the company said in a statement.

(Additional reporting by Leigh Coleman, Michael Peltier and Jeremy Pelofsky, writing by Chris Baltimore; editing by Mary Milliken, Vicki Allen, Martin Howell and Anthony Boadle)