In the first installment of this series we reviewed the beginnings of the 1965 West Coast blackout and the civil unrest the blackout spawned. In this chapter, we’ll look back at the blackout’s extension to San Diego; the intervention of California Highway Patrol officers in Los Angeles when tensions in Watts threatened to explode into full-scale rioting; and the climax of the Boeing plant siege in Seattle.

 ******

Three thousand miles away from the chaos which was engulfing Los Angeles and Seattle-- to name just two of the cities affected by the West Coast blackout --New York City mayor John Lindsay was counting his blessings that his own metropolis wasn’t having similar troubles. He’d been keeping abreast of the blackout via TV and radio bulletins, and he didn’t particularly like what he was hearing. From everything the news reports were saying it sounded as if Los Angeles and Seattle were on the verge of turning into war zones-- and things were hardly much better in San Francisco. No sooner had the first bulletins about scattered outages in Seattle’s suburbs hit New York’s newspapers than Mayor Lindsay ordered his city electrical inspectors to perform a top- to-bottom snap inspection of all metropolitan transformer stations and power lines.

For the next 36 hours Consolidated Edison utility vans would race up and down the streets of New York’s five boroughs, checking for the slightest hint of trouble in the city’s power grid. Other inspectors traveled just outside the city to check over the transformer stations responsible for channeling electricity to New York’s suburbs. When the inspections were finished, the inspectors brought back rather sobering news for the mayor: the Big Apple’s electrical infrastructure was just as vulnerable to a massive blackout as the West Coast’s power grid had proven to be.

But for all the headaches Lindsay would have to endure in trying to make the Big Apple’s power grid blackout-proof, he could indeed be grateful that he was being spared the much greater troubles his fellow mayors in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle were having to face just then....

******

...troubles which would shortly be gripping the normally tranquil San Diego as the blackout extended to that city. Starting around 1:30 AM Pacific time(4:30 AM Eastern time) on November 10th, lights began to blink out in the city’s outer neighborhoods; by 2:05 AM at least half of downtown San Diego had been plunged into darkness. Just across the border in Tijuana tourists making their way home from vacations in Mexico saw the San Diego skyline suddenly go dark and quickly sensed something was amiss. When they turned on the radio for news of what was happening in that city, their suspicions were confirmed-- as of 3:00 AM all of metropolitan San Diego and many of San Diego’s suburbs were without electricity and the California Highway Patrol had been called in to aid the beleaguered SDPD in its attempts to maintain at least a semblance of law and order. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, suspecting that so-called “coyotes” might try to exploit the crisis to increase the number of illegal immigrants they smuggled over the U.S.-Mexico border, put extra agents on guard along the frontier in hopes of discouraging the “coyotes”.

At the city’s Marine Corps installations troops were on alert as a precautionary measure; they were less affected by the blackout than the rest of San Diego thanks in part to emergency backup generators which were activated within minutes after the Marine base’s commanders were first informed of the blackout. But still they kept their rifles loaded and ready in anticipation of trouble along the base perimeter. Outside the perimeter San Diego police and CHP troopers did their best to hold off potential troublemakers, working with base MPs to dissuade would-be gatecrashers from trying their luck with the fences.

As tense as things were in San Diego, they were a country picnic compared with what was going on up in Seattle at the Boeing aircraft production plant. The factory’s workers and security personnel were besieged by a crowd of rioters who were throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the plant’s fences in an attempt to storm the factory and get hold of whatever loot they could get their hands on. By 4:00 AM on the morning of November 10th some fifty-eight people had died as a result of the violence near the Boeing plant and another forty were hospitalized. Something drastic would have to be done to prevent the rioters from overwhelming the factory guards and laying waste to the factory itself, so at 4:15 AM the governor of Washington State issued a directive to the commandant of the state National Guard to dispatch troops to the factory to quell the riot.

Around 5:20 AM the first Guard trucks arrived at the Boeing plant and began disgorging troops to deal with the rioters. Seeing that they were outgunned, and not wanting to risk a confrontation with the Guard troops they would probably lose, the rioters fled the scene less than ten minutes later, bringing a peaceful end to a situation that all too easily could have exploded into citywide chaos. Once the rioters were dispersed, National Guard medics and first responders from Seattle’s civilian hospitals quickly set to work treating Boeing employees and plant security guards who’d been injured during the standoff. By 9:00 AM nearly a hundred people from the plant would be admitted to Seattle hospital emergency wards; most would be treated and released within a day of their admission.

It was around 7:45 AM on the morning of November 10th when utility crews finally began restoring power to Seattle’s outer suburbs. Within 90 minutes most of metropolitan Seattle proper would also regain its electricity; the last neighborhoods in the area still without power would see their electric services restored by 10:30. With the lights back on, Seattle civic authorities could now shift their focus toward the task of cleaning up the debris left behind by the unrest which the West Coast blackout had triggered.

******

Down in Los Angeles, meanwhile, LAPD command officials desperate for help to contain a city that seemed on the verge of exploding into all-out civil war had contacted the L.A. County branch offices of the California Highway Patrol to request the dispatch of CHP personnel to the Watts district to assist LAPD personnel in defusing the tensions which were still simmering there hours after the West Coast blackout had reached the Los Angeles city limits. In hopes of avoiding a repeat of the rioting that had devastated Watts two months earlier and whose scars were still visible to the unaided eye in some neighborhoods, the CHP immediately granted the LAPD’s request.

The CHP troopers who were deployed to Los Angeles to back up the beleaguered LAPD personnel in Watts came bearing what looked like an array of gear seemingly more suited to the guerrilla war then raging in Vietnam than to situations of domestic unrest. This fact would in later years provoke some radical black activists to accuse the CHP of conspiring with the LAPD to commit mass murder against the residents of the Watts district. The CHP brass at the time had little to say on the matter other than to insist the equipment was meant for defensive purposes; still, the controversy would play a part in the formation of California’s first civilian police review board.

For the next three hours following the CHP troopers’ arrival, a Mexican standoff prevailed in Watts. It was an open question whether they would prevent a riot or be its first casualties. But eventually, tensions began to ease and the CHP and LAPD officers began to restore order in the district. There were no major violent incidents in Watts, although police did have to intervene to break up a few minor scuffles between neighborhood residents and outsiders allegedly caught in the act of trying to burglarize local business; some of those accused of such burglary attempts would later turn out to indeed have been guilty on that score, and in at least one instance where a man was accused of attempted burglary it would prove to have been the least of his sins. Still, L.A. officials didn’t want to be seen as encouraging vigilante justice-- even when it might to some degree be warranted.

Once order had been restored in the Watts district, the next task was to get electrical power restored to the district so its residents could resume their normal lives and local authorities could finish the job of cleaning up the damage inflicted by the August riots. This was accomplished mid-afternoon on November 11th; by November 12th, the last of the CHP contingent had returned to their usual duties and the LAPD had resumed its usual patrol schedule in Watts. With electrical power fully restored to the district, work crews arrived to pick up where they had left off in mending the damage from the August riots; local businesses, which had been losing money during the time that Watts was without electrical power, made good their losses and then some thanks in part to the cleanup crews’ generous spending....