A Night Without City Light

In which the Brigade deprives an affluent suburb of power on New Year’s Eve and bombs Safeway—again—to show that they can be precise in the damage that they inflict

            “I say bomb the suburbs because the suburbs have been bombing us for at least the last forty years. They have waged an economic, political, and cultural war on life in the city. The city has responded by declaring war on itself.”

            - Billy Wimsatt, Bomb the Suburbs, 1994

The idea for the Brigade’s next action came from above. One evening in October Rita was sitting in a bar up the hill from Pioneer Square. Everything went dark. She and her companion grabbed their glasses of beer and walked outside. Looking down Jackson to the waterfront, they could see that power to the whole area was out. They investigated further and found that a fuel truck on the Alaskan Way Viaduct, on the coastal rim of downtown, had crashed and was pouring flaming fuel down into a terminal of City Light, the public utility, below. City Light workers, on strike since October 17^th demanding a retroactive pay raise and the negotiation of a new contract, refused to repair the damage, prolonging the power outage. [1]

The following day a couple members of the Brigade walked the picket line with the rank-and-file of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local 77. The topic of the previous day’s blackout was discussed. “It was great!” one picketer enthused. “It showed the city our power!”

At the next collective meeting, City Light was proposed as a target. It was ideal because not only was it the city’s most prominent labor dispute, but the utility had been accused by consumers of price-gouging. In addition, eight of the company’s ten female employees had just been terminated September 24, ’75. Their initial training program, which integrated the reluctant company gender-wise, had only begun the summer of the previous year. The crime for which the women were dismissed was having been impertinent enough to complain to the city’s Office of Women’s Rights that they were underpaid and had not been trained as promised.[2] The element of sex discrimination made City Light a particularly appropriate target for the Brigade’s first action as a female-enhanced organization.

 The New Year was coming up. It was the country’s bicentennial. The patriotic outpouring was a provocation.

“How ‘bout an action on New Year’s Eve?”

            “Let’s take out a transformer in a rich neighborhood,” suggested Ed, whose internship with the New World Liberation Front, a constant adversary of Pacific Gas & Electric in the San Francisco Bay Area had given him a taste for disrupting infrastructure. “Let ‘em bring in the New Year in the dark so they can feel how the poor do when City Light cuts off their electricity.”

            With so many people in the Brigade they were ready for more than one action.

            “Is there a way we could criticize ourselves on the Safeway action and do another one?” Rita asked.

            “How about we bomb Safeway again, so it’s clear we still consider them a class enemy, but we’ll criticize ourselves for recklessly endangering working people in the previous action,” suggested Bruce.

            Rita and Tammy were sympathetic to Safeway as a target, considering it an obnoxious chain that profited from communities while ignoring their concerns. The company’s dispute with the United Farm Workers (UFW) had made it notorious among progressives, nearly all of whom respected the UFW’s plea for a boycott, and its imposition of a new store on Capitol Hill, despite vociferous objections from the neighborhood residents, prompted caused local revulsion. This latter issue was inflamed at the time Rita and Tammy moved to Capitol Hill: the Broadway branch of the store opened a block away just as the women were creating the 10^th Street Collective. One further practice of the company completed its general anti-life profile: it not only routinely discarded large quantities of perfectly serviceable produce, but locked its dumpsters so that no one could eat the cosmetically-challenged products. This particularly infuriated Rita and Tammy’s’ new friends Patrick and Faygele, two of the most enthusiastic dumpsterers in the scene.

            In contrast to the impatience of the communiqué accompanying the first Safeway bombing, the one the Brigade composed in preparation for their New Year’s Eve actions spelled out their objections to the company:

            Safeway…is the world’s largest food chain and a powerful agribusiness and imperialist.  Safeway has effectively monopolized all facets of the food processing, distribution, and retailing industry on the west coast.  As a large international landowner, it is the recipient of large federal subsidies and [has] actively forced the small farmer from his land and liv[e]lihood.  As a large grower, Safeway has consistently and violently oppressed the farmworkers and fought their struggle for a union.  Safeway makes its superprofits by charging poor and working people outrageously inflated prices for nutritionally deficient and chemically poisoned food.

Brigade members—particularly Bruce—had also not forgotten the murder, by a plainclothes “mercenary,” of a suspected shoplifter the previous summer at the Safeway branch the Brigade bombed in the fall. That Brigade’s action, however, “was wrong because we brought violence and terror into a poor neighborhood…” Though modest, this one line was the only public apology by a paramilitary organization throughout the U.S. in the entire ‘60s and ‘70s period.

            In the face of all these corporate crimes, “it is not surprising,” the communiqué continued, “that Safeway has been the target of massive resistance by the people including pickets, boycotts, educationals, demonstrations and anti-trust suits.  And it is not surprising that Safeway has been the target of bombings and armed actions up and down the west coast throughout 1975.” One of these other attacks occurred on Sunday December 28 ‘75, as the Brigade was composing their communiqué, at a Safeway in Belmont, CA. Other bombs had been found or set off at Safeway stores in Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose.

            The Brigade chose a quote from Assata Shakur, a jailed ex-Panther being tried on numerous charges stemming from involvement in the Black Liberation Army, to illuminate the invisible mechanisms of coercion which make daily life under capitalism a politically charged terrain. “They call us bandits, yet every time most Black people pick up our paychecks we are being robbed.  Every time we walk into a store in our neighborhood we are being held up.  And every time we pay our rent, the landlord sticks a gun in our ribs.” After Assata’s word “Black” in the first sentence of the above quote they inserted “and poor and working” so as to add a class component which included their own struggle as a predominantly white organization.

            As for City Light, the communiqué stated clearly from the start: “We of the George Jackson Brigade are not City Light workers, but we do live and work in Seattle and City Light is our enemy too.” They explained that they had been inspired by the “courageous” efforts of City Light workers to resist “a massive campaign by the ruling class to force poor and working people to shoulder the burden of this economic crisis.”

            Appeals followed to both City Light employees and the Seattle public. City Light workers were urged “to rely on the people” both to win their strike and “to further the complex process of revolution and liberation for all oppressed people.” “[A]ll workers, poor, oppressed and progressive people in Seattle,” in turn, were asked to “demonstrate their support for City Light workers.”

            In sum, “We have tried to make this New Year’s attack a reflection of the lessons we learned this past year.” “We are not terrorists,” they insisted. Their plans to place a pipebomb in a park in a residential neighborhood were in contradiction with their apology for the Safeway bombing because: “We have no qualms about bringing discriminate violence to the rich.” “Safeway and City Lights are our own class enemies and the class enemies of all who have felt hunger in their bellies or who have been cold in the winter because they couldn’t pay their electric bill,” and thus legitimate targets.   

            Police anticipated just the sort of attack the Brigade was planning. On December 29^th, Lieutenant Jay Andersen, head of the Seattle Police Department (SPD) Intelligence Section, said he expected bombings in the city in the New Year, and that the Weather Underground would likely be the culprit. “We are coming into an election year in a Bicentennial year… We know there are groups who advocate a ‘Second Revolution’… in this area.” Andersen predicted that the number of “terrorist” incidents would increase in the New Year. Continuing to ignore the Brigade’s two claimed actions, Andersen asserted that, as they had in ’75, Weather “will provide the fireworks” in ‘76.

            Police chief Robert Hanson also provided a pessimistic forecast: “There are people in the U.S. that are planning acts of terrorism to interfere with this year’s Bicentennial activities.”[3] “These people have told us that they are going to blow out the candles on our birthday cake,” Major W.F. Moore, head of the SPD Criminal Investigations Division, stated dryly.

            At 6:30 p.m. on the 31^st of December, the state Highway Patrol received a warning that there was a threat of a hundred bombings of public buildings in the U.S. at midnight. They relayed the message, which probably originated with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) in response to information gleaned in the investigation of a massive blast several days earlier at New York City’s La Guardia Airport, to law enforcement agencies throughout the state.[4]

            Despite forewarning, law enforcement had no idea how to defend against such an amorphous threat. Thus no police officers saw Ed and Mark carrying a heavy box between them into a park on a knoll overlooking the University of Washington in the affluent Laurelhurst district in northeastern Seattle. Nor did they see them cut through a wire fence surrounding the City Light substation at NE 45^th St. and 31^st Ave., on the park’s west end, and deposit their package. Police similarly failed to intercept John and Tammy as they made two similar deposits—one under an unoccupied wing of Safeway’s new Administrative Headquarters, the other between a small pumping station and an adjacent water tank—at Safeway’s Regional Warehouse and Distribution Center, a barbed wire enclosed complex at NE 12^th St. and 125^th Ave. NE in Bellevue.

            The tip-off to law enforcement came from the people who had made these deliveries. At 11:20 p.m. the Seattle police received a call from a man warning of bombs at the Laurelhurst park and the Bellevue Safeway. The SPD immediately sent officers to evacuate homes near the substation, and called the Bellevue police with the Safeway information. Seattle police were already in the area when a column of fire sprouted from the park and the first frantic calls came in reporting power outages. Bellevue police were on their way to the Safeway Center when they heard the first explosion at 11:40 PM. The second blast came ten minutes later.

            At about 12:30 am on the morning of January 1, a man called Bellevue radio station KZAM, which was about a mile from the blasts, and told program manager Tom Corddry that the GJB “had detonated three bombs.” The caller—described, by the sound of his voice, as being in his twenties or thirties—said the communiqué, with details, was taped to a wooden sign in front of the building that housed the radio studios.

After delivering the communiqué, those who’d carried out the actions returned to the safe house, where they joined Rita, who’d been monitoring the police scanner. Together, they listened to the radio in heavy anticipation. The New Year came and went without any information. The Brigade members’ anxiety was mixing with impatience when the news flash came: a spectacular flame was illuminating the sky above the City Light substation in Laurelhurst. The explosion which prompted the fireworks had knocked out power to much of the neighborhood.

Collective members cheered and laughed and dropped acid. After music and dancing, the mood quieted. Tammy went to bed, as did, in time, Bruce, Ed and John. Rita and Mark began an intense conversation. Despite having been friends for well over a year, in many ways it was their first. As they watched a lamp morph, Mark began to share his earlier experiences in the Washington State juvenile justice system: the electroshock and cold water therapy; the continual gurneys carrying shrouded corpses; his escape attempt and subsequent beating. One particularly chilling image was his recollection of being forced to scoop up blood with a dustpan and dump it into a bucket when he worked as an orderly in a unit in which another prisoner snapped and began puncturing his fellow inmates. Rita listened quietly: Mark’s incarceration had been worse than even she, with her expansive ability to believe the worst of institutions, had imagined.

Mark rose as daylight broke. “I’m going to have to go home.”

“Are you sure you can drive?” Rita asked.

“I think so. I’ve never taken this stuff before.”

“Call me when you get home,” she instructed.  

Firefighters had difficulty extinguishing the flames in Laurelhurst because the large amounts of oil in the transformers fed the blaze—it took over an hour to quell the inferno.[5] Fragments from the blast were found as far as a block away. The sonic impact broke eleven windows out of the nearest house, and sent a stream of burning oil down the hill into its driveway, torching a Ford van parked there.

            ATF and FBI agents assisted Seattle and Bellevue police to comb through blast remains for evidence, and flew bomb fragments to D.C. for analysis. These were the only of the hundred bombings which were prophesied to have taken place throughout the country on New Year’s Eve. Despite the claim of responsibility from the Brigade, Lt. Andersen of the SPD’s Intelligence Section continued to insist that the Weather Underground was responsible for the local blasts. Contradictorily, he didn’t disclaim the responsibility of the GJB, and declined to publicly discuss possible connections between the two groups.

            The damage at Safeway’s Regional Warehouse and Distribution Center was relatively small. Police didn’t immediately release a dollar estimate of the damage inflicted by the first explosion; the second they placed at $50.

            The destruction of the City Light substation, on the other hand, cost the city an estimated $250,000 to replace, making it the costliest bombing to occur in Seattle since 1969, when an explosion at the University of Washington Administrative Building did nearly $350,000 damage. Not only was the Laurelhurst blast dramatically more expensive, many people were inconvenienced as well. Nearly a thousand homes lost electricity, which wasn’t restored until noon on the next day, and traffic lights went out. There was a five second pause as a hospital switched to its backup generator—a particularly unwelcome interruption for those on respirators.

            Power was relayed from some of the city’s other hundred-plus substations—a new transformer, City Light officials explained, couldn’t be put in place for at least thirty days. In the meantime, City Light Superintendent Gordon Vickery asked Laurelhurst residents in the affected district to cut down on their use of electricity at prime times.

            When asked about the GJB’s reference to striking City Light workers in their communiqué, Vickery stated “We see no connection with this bombing and our labor problems.”[6] The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers immediately disavowed the attack but, on January 2^nd, to the delight of the Brigade and the consternation of the local political elite and opinion makers, City Light workers announced their refusal to provide emergency assistance to repair the bombed out substations. Charles Silvernale, local 77 business representative, reiterated the claim that he had made immediately after the bombing, that the union “deplores any such action.” There would be no return to work, however, without management approval of a wage increase, as well as the entrance into a marathon bargaining session to work out a contract for ‘76. When the strike first began the union said it would have a standby crew of linemen available in case of emergencies. But it did not consider the Laurelhurst detonation a real emergency because there was no threat to life. The precedent: their refusal to repair the damage brought about by the tanker truck explosion on the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The local did not picket the bomb site—they would only have done this, they announced, if outside contractors had been brought in to do the work—but did send a union “safety surveillance” group to make sure their supervisors didn’t injure themselves or others as they made the repairs.

            In response to the local’s position, Superintendent Vickery complained that the union’s conditions for assisting in repair of the substation “amounted to settling the strike on the union’s terms,” and that such a decision would require a city council ordinance.[7]

            An angry editorial by the Post-Intelligencer denounced the anti-democratic ideas inherent in the Brigade’s attempt to influence local politics by force. “Bombs substitute for ballots among ideologues afraid to stand up in public to submit their ideas for discussion and vote… [S]uch bombings are the acts, not of the brave, but of those who fear that their ideas, if submitted to the rough-and-tumble public debate, would be rejected.” “The real crime,” the editors continued, “is not just intellectual. It’s that they are willing to risk the lives of other humans to get attention for ideas that in their own minds they apparently feel too feeble to stand the sunlight of free and open debate.”

            City Light workers, furthermore, didn’t need any such assistance: “The electrical workers know they can take care of themselves, on or off picket lines.” This, indeed, was not the case. The beleaguered strikers settled with the company shortly after New Year’s on terms significantly less than those which they had gone on strike demanding. Though the Post-Intelligencer claimed “The striking unionists…deplored the bombing,” the official disavowal didn’t mean that none of the strikers derived satisfaction from the act. One of City Light’s first “linewomen,” though fired and not yet reinstated at the time of the blast, she discussed the matter with her coworkers once she returned to work. “Let’s just say there were a lot of happy people!” she proclaimed.[8] Another former City Light worker remarked that, in the years immediately following the attack, a cohort of her colleagues toasted the Brigade every New Year’s Eve.

            The Post-Intelligencer’s editors also asserted: “The last place any ideological bomber would dare stand and equate a bomb with progress is at a union meeting.”[9] In as much as the behavior described would certainly bring well-deserved charges of being an agent provocateur in the employ of the company and/or police, this statement is certainly true. But it ignored the strong “stick it to ‘em!” class warfare impulsiveness of American labor, especially before “the Great Compromise” between labor and capital that followed World War II. This earlier period was very much a living memory for the city’s unionists in the ‘70s.[10]

            “Let the bourgeois press howl!” Ed proclaimed with glee. The Post-Intelligencer’s rant simply confirms what to him had become irrefutable: armed struggle was the proper path.

Three City Light “linewomen” circa ’75-’76 (Kathy Mulady “City Light’s pioneering female line workers are retiring” PI 8 4 04)

Copyright© Daniel Burton Rose - Do not duplicate without permission.