It was one of the biggest crises the United States had faced since the end of the Second World War. What started with a lightning strike at a transformer northwest of Seattle turned into a massive blackout that would eventually span nearly the entire Pacific coast of the U.S. and before it ended would threaten to plunge Los Angeles into riots less than three months after civil unrest had devastated much of the Watts district. In short, the 1965 West Coast blackout was one of the most harrowing events in modern American history. Even now, almost half a century after it happened, the blackout is still having profound effects on America.

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Ironically, before the West Coast blackout, most government and public concerns regarding the U.S. power grid had focused primarily on the East Coast. In fact, the lightning strike which first triggered the West Coast blackout came just as Seattle’s NBC-TV affiliate was retracting an erroneous news bulletin claiming New York had been hit with a citywide power outage. (Embarrassed at having both been dead wrong on the imagined blackout and caught off-guard by the real one, the station’s news director would resign his position just two weeks after the West Coast crisis ended.)

It was just before 6:30 PM Pacific time(9:30 Eastern time) on November 9th, 1965 when a lightning bolt hit an electrical transformer station about fifteen miles northwest of Seattle and caused a power surge which blew out every electric system in the station. The strike triggered a cascade effect that within half an hour would plunge the metropolitan Seattle area into total darkness and disrupt service to thousands of homes in Oregon. By 8:45 PM Pacific time the cascade’s effects would start to be felt in northern California. By 10:25 PM (2:25 AM Eastern time November 10th), the Los Angeles mayor’s office was receiving reports of scattered power outages in Simi Valley and West Covina.

Los Angeles itself lost most of its electrical power just before 11:00 PM, confronting then-L.A. mayor Sam Yorty with the most serious municipal crisis which his administration had faced since the riots in Watts less than three months earlier. Without waiting for a report on the full extent of the trouble, Yorty ordered the immediate activation of the LAPD riot squad-- a move that some of Yorty’s critics would at first slam as an overreaction on his part but turned out to be a wise precaution in light of events to come.

As utility crews worked to restore power and federal and state emergency officials scrambled to maintain civil order, rumors whizzed around the streets of West Coast cities like the police squad cars and National Guard trucks already being dispatched to forestall would-be looters. One rumor alleged the Soviets had detonated an atomic bomb in the upper atmosphere for the purpose of generating an EMP burst which would disable the U.S. West Coast power grid; another rumor suggested the blackout was the result of sabotage by leftist militants who were upset with the Johnson Administration’s Vietnam policies; still other rumors claimed that the blackout had been caused by an earthquake or by extraterrestrials attempting to soften Earth up for invasion. There was even a suggestion by a certain New Orleans radio DJ that the West Coast blackout had been brought about by black magic-- a proposition few people other than tabloid magazine editors were inclined to take seriously.

But one thing everybody took seriously was the danger that the growing unrest in cities like Los Angeles and Seattle posed to the public’s safety. Then-California governor Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown was sufficiently concerned by the events unfolding as a result of the blackout to declare a state of emergency for all major metropolitan areas from the state capital Sacramento to the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood. Meanwhile, up in Oregon, the cities of Portland and Salem had already been in a state of emergency since 9:30 PM Pacific time (12:30 AM Eastern time November 10th) and backup generators had been pressed into service to keep hospitals in those cities functioning.

Word of the West Coast blackout reached the White House around 12:15 AM EST on the morning of November 10th when the governor of Washington state phoned President Lyndon Johnson to apprise him of the situation in Seattle. Johnson in turn contacted FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and had him direct the bureau’s offices in Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco to dispatch their field agents to aid state and municipal law enforcement authorities in maintaining the peace in areas affected by the blackout.

That would prove easier said than done in some cases, however; even as Hoover was taking Johnson’s call San Francisco’s Tenderloin district had exploded into full-scale riots. A seemingly minor dispute between a tourist from Chicago and a bartender at one of the city’s seedier drinking establishments had escalated into a fistfight, then a Pier 6 brawl, and finally into a district-wide orgy of violence that forced San Francisco’s mayor to call the Marin County sheriff’s office for assistance in containing the unrest. Twenty-two people had already been killed by the time the Marin County sheriff’s department got its first warning about the riots; another eighteen would die, including two SFPD patrolmen, before the violence within the Tenderloin district was finally brought under control.

Elsewhere in San Francisco, an NBA game which had been scheduled to be played in the Cow Palace that night had to be postponed because neither of the teams involved could make their way to the arena due to loss of power to the traffic lights in the area. (The game was finally held on November 12th in Reno, Nevada.) The famous Golden Gate Bridge was jammed from end to end with stranded motorists who’d had the ill luck to be in the middle of crossing it when the lights went out. And at Candlestick Park, where the 49ers had been holding a team meeting in preparation for a road game against the Detroit Lions the following Sunday, stadium maintenance crews had their hands full trying to get Candlestick’s backup generators going. On the other side of the bay, service personnel at the Oakland-Alameda naval base had gone on full alert while their officers tried to sort out what was going on in the rest of the Bay Area.

Back in Seattle, where the West Coast blackout had started, the National Guard was trying desperately to keep a lid on a city which was threatening to explode. Conditions in the city had deteriorated to the point where its most famous commercial enterprise, the Boeing aircraft plant, had been put on lockdown by Washington state police in order to keep intruders from attacking the facility or sabotaging vital equipment; some Seattle metropolitan police officers had gotten trapped inside their own precinct stations by rioters throwing rocks and other objects at them. The mayor had been compelled to declare s dusk-to-dawn curfew to protect the civil population, and tourists who had the misfortune to be caught in the city when the lights went out were advised by local authorities to stay in their hotel rooms until order had been restored...