California Chase Bank LIVE: Man with ‘bomb strapped to chest’ takes hostage in Bakersfield

Unconfirmed reports indicate the man armed with a bomb at the scene may be armed with a dead man’s switch.

Again, these are unconfirmed reports, but we at The Mirror are doing all we can to confirm this detail.

For those out there unfamiliar with what has become of a classic Hollywood trope, often used to ramp up the tension in countless action movies, a dead man’s switch is a fail-safe mechanism designed to activate or deactivate a system automatically if the human operator becomes incapacitated, falls asleep, or loses consciousness.

It requires continuous, active human input and will trigger an emergency response – often with fatal consequences – if that input ceases.The action-movie crutch has been used most famously in the 1994 film Speed – alternatively known as The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down. Speed considered to be the ultimate dead man’s switch thriller. Keanu Reeves stars as LAPD SWAT officer Jack Traven, tasked with stopping a bomb-rigged city bus from exploding by keeping its speed above 50 mph. Reeves starred in the 90s box office-bursting classic alongside Sandra Bullock and Dennis Hopper.