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Electric Nightmares:, Part 3:
The 1965 West Coast Blackout And The Crisis Following It
by Chris Oakley




Summary: In the first two installments of this series we reviewed the 1965 West Coast blackout and the crisis that ensued in the blackout’s wake. In this third and final chapter, we’ll summarize how America was changed in the years after the blackout.

 ******


The final cost of the West Coast blackout, in both financial and human terms, proved to be staggering when it was finally calculated. Property damage alone topped $70 million, and at least one hundred and fifty people had died during the blackout; many of those deaths were people who’d been on life support in hospitals in the affected cities at the time the blackout began and as a result of the loss of electric power by those hospitals had succumbed to their illnesses. Municipal, state, country, and federal law enforcement agencies had had to pay a small fortune in overtime to their officers during the crisis, and at least two state governments were on the hook for thousands of dollars to cover the cost of deploying National Guard troops at the height of the blackout. The financial cost soared even higher when one factored in the profits lost by private businesses during the time electrical power was out-- in Lon Angeles alone, more than two dozen small stores had to close up shop because they’d lost too much revenue as a result of the blackout.

     At the Boeing plant in Seattle, management had the unenviable task of trying to get their factory back in operation after the chaos that had kept it shut down during the hours of the blackout. Some of the workers at the plant had fled in terror as the siege of the night before showed signs of turning into a full-scale riot, and even those who stayed were showing signs of nervous exhaustion after the ordeal at the plant. What in today’s terms might be known as post-traumatic stress disorder was readily apparent among the plant workers-- and for that matter among many of their bosses. Some Boeing employees would go on to spend years, if not decades, undergoing psychological counseling to cope with the terrors they’d gone through during the blackout.

    In San Francisco, the city’s hospitals had their hands full with trying to treat those injured as a result of the blackout; not only had there been numerous people hurt in the Tenderloin district riots, but dozens of motorists had been injured-- some critically --in car crashes on the city’s streets. Perhaps the worst of these crashes was a ten-car pileup on the Golden Gate Bridge which left at least two of the victims in a long-term coma. It had taken police and local towing companies the better part of half a day to clear out the wreckage from those collisions, to say nothing of the struggle San Francisco’s fire department had to endure in keeping the oil spilled during the crashes from bursting into flames.      Even in Portland, Oregon, which had gotten off relatively lightly compared to many other West Coast cities, there was still a great deal of recovery work to be done in the aftermath of the blackout. Not the least of the tasks confronting then-Portland mayor Terry Doyle Schrunk’s administration was cleaning up the wreckage left behind by a five-car pileup that happened in Portland’s downtown area just before the power outage ended. That knot would be a particularly expensive one for Schrunk to untangle; it ended up costing the city thousands of dollars in towing fees, medical bills, overtime for police and other city workers, and last but not least damages paid to the families of two crash victims who sued the city for negligence. Those lawsuits would be just the beginning of a decade-long legal nightmare for City Hall.

     In early December of 1965 President Johnson convened a meeting of mayors from America’s largest cities at the White House to discuss what could be done to minimize the risk of another widespread regional power outage like the West Coast blackout. A month later, Johnson announced one of the most comprehensive domestic infrastructure initiatives proposed by any president in three decades: the American Electrical Transmission Safety Act. Better known as “the Blackout Act”, the new law was intended to provide a safety net for the nation’s electrical grid; in addition to mandating improvements for existing electrical transmission equipment and setting a higher quality standard for new power transmission devices, the law also gave the U.S. Justice Department discretionary authority to deal with sabotage of electrical equipment as an act of terrorism.

     Less than three months after the Blackout Act went into effect the Justice Department mounted its first major prosecution under the new law. Two brothers in Tennessee were arrested by the FBI after they attacked a TVA-owned substation with rocks and fragments of brick in protest of the federal government’s decision to evict their mother from a farmhouse that had been in their family for generations. The ensuing trial lasted nearly six weeks and sparked a nationwide controversy as people argued over the question of whether the security provisions of the Blackout Act went too far or didn’t go far enough; when the brothers were found guilty, demands for a retrial turned the Johnson White House inside out. There have even been suggestions in some circles that the uproar over the trial may have played a part in Johnson’s decision not to seek another term as President in 1968.

******

     If the Blackout Act’s security provisions had been controversial at the time they were first enacted, they would become still more so during the 1970s. As the Watergate scandal erupted and massive protests against the Vietnam War challenged traditional American views of government, many leading political figures began to reconsider the value of the terrorism provisions of the Blackout Act; in the 1972 presidential campaign George McGovern promised that if he were elected one of his first official acts as commander-in-chief would be to order a thorough review of the security clauses of the Blackout Act. Predictably McGovern’s Republican opponent, incumbent president Richard Nixon, defended those clauses as an absolute necessity for the safety of the American people and promised to step up federal enforcement of those regulations in his second term. That pledge would later come back to haunt Nixon as the Watergate scandal exploded and a growing suspicion manifested itself within the ranks of Congress that Nixon was exploiting the Blackout Act’s security provisions for the sake of furthering his own agenda.

    When Gerald Ford was thrust into the Presidency following Nixon’s resignation, he became the default target of the frustrations felt by his predecessor’s critics regarding abuses of the security protocols of the Blackout Act. This, combined with Ford’s own propensity for physical clumsiness and general disgust with the GOP in the aftermath of all the damaging revelations that had come to light during the Watergate hearings in the Senate, would make it extremely difficult for Ford to achieve any kind of traction when he attempted to gain Congressional support for his proposals for reforming those protocols. Ford’s troubles in enlisting any Senate or House backing for ideas on preventing abuse of the Blackout Act security clauses have been cited by some political scholars as a possible factor in his defeat by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential elections.

******

    Like McGovern, Carter had pledged to overhaul the security clauses of the Blackout Act during his first term as president. And sure enough one of his first official acts following his inauguration was to sign an executive order mandating restrictions on the Justice Department’s once- untrammeled authority to investigate and prosecute actions of sabotaging electrical equipment as acts of terrorism. As one might imagine, Carter’s edict didn’t sit well with his conservative critics, who regarded it as a gold-engraved invitation for lawbreakers everywhere to wreak havoc on the national electrical grid. And when another major blackout hit Los Angeles in the summer of 1977, it looked as if those critics’ dire warnings might be starting to come true. Carter certainly didn’t help his case any with his administration’s slow initial response to the blackout.

    Indeed, the controversy over Carter’s handling of the ’77 Los Angeles blackout would mar much of the rest of his presidency. When he ran for a second term in 1980 he was confronted at every campaign stop with endless daily reminders of the human and financial toll the power outage took on the City of Angels. Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, his rival for the Democratic nomination in 1980, seldom if ever passed up an opportunity to castigate the incumbent president on his handling(or mishandling, in the eyes of the Kennedy campaign) of the Los Angeles blackout; Ronald Reagan, Carter’s Republican opponent in the November general election, memorably commented in the second Reagan-Carter presidential debate that the Carter administration’s handling of the LA blackout was “an even bigger calamity than the blackout itself”.

    Reagan won over a substantial portion of conservative voters in 1980 with his promise to-- as one of his campaign speeches put it --“take the handcuffs off” the Justice Department in its efforts to fight violations of the Blackout Act. He certainly kept that promise: during his first two years in the White House Blackout Act-related federal prosecutions, which had been steadily declining during the Ford and Carter years, started to rise again. By the time Reagan formally declared his intention to seek a second term one out of every four federal investigations were related to the Blackout Act in some way and a quarter of all criminal cases tried in federal courts were cases prosecuted under the act’s security provisions. Reagan’s former vice president and eventual successor, George H.W. Bush, would pick up right where Reagan had left off; one of the first executive orders of Bush 41’s administration was a directive authorizing the FBI to share information with the Secret Service regarding Blackout Act-related crimes. That directive would play an increasingly crucial role in federal anti-terrorism efforts after 9/11.

   The Clinton Administration saw the Justice Department’s approach to enforcing the Blackout Act partly de-emphasize its terrorism provisions in favor of pursuing fraud cases against companies known or suspected to have falsified certain financial documents in order to boost their total profits and reduce their tax payments to the IRS. There were suggestions by some conservative pundits during the Whitewater and Monica scandals that Clinton was using the Blackout Act as a bludgeon with which to beat his political critics into submission(if so, then it would seem the ploy backfired). Some of the controversy stemming from these accusations would rub off on Vice-President Al Gore; it’s been theorized by some political analysts it was this factor rather than the Florida recount crisis which actually ended up costing Gore the presidential election in 2000.

   When the second Bush administration was sworn into office in 2001, the Justice Department’s Blackout Act enforcement division gradually shifted its focus back toward the anti-terrorism work that had been its principal mission under past presidencies. The 9/11 attacks solidified this refocus on guarding the nation’s electrical grid against terrorist attacks; right up until the Bush 43 presidency ended in 2009, anti-terrorism probes were the most common type of Blackout Act-related investigation handled by the Justice Department.

******

   Today, nearly a half-century after the massive power failure that sparked its enactment, the Blackout Act remains one of the most hotly debated federal laws on the books. During his first term as president Barack Obama, one of the law’s most fervent critics as a senator, set off a firestorm of controversy when he radically and publicly changed his stance and called for a Congressional renewal of the act. And when he campaigned for re-election in 2012, he drew heavy criticism from the left and the right alike after he told a campaign rally audience in New Mexico that it was “a vital necessity” to keep the Blackout Act alive. Obama’s challenger in that campaign, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, pounced on this statement as a sign of what the Republican Party viewed as Obama’s “hypocrisy” on the issue of civil liberties; although it wasn’t enough to get Romney past the incumbent in the balloting that November, it helped energize the GOP base and inspired conservatives in the House and Senate to push for the White House to reform the Blackout Act-- or even repeal it if the Tea Party had their way.

    The Blackout Act is expected to be a lightning rod issue during the 2016 presidential campaign. Two potential candidates have already gone on record as intended to seek the act’s repeal, while another has pledged to fight for a long-term extension of the act. The Nation and The American Spectator, two political magazines that are usually worlds apart on most issues, have both recently published editorials criticizing the Blackout Act as a case of excessive government intrusion on individual liberties. And regardless of which party winds up with control of Congress after the 2014 midterm House and Senate elections, the question of what to do about the Blackout Act is likely to occupy a massive portion of the legislative agenda in the next few years.

 

The End

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