Power Play

The trouble began in late September, when three electrical-transmission towers, all over 70 ft. high, in a remote, wooded area 140 miles east of Portland, Ore., were rocked by a dynamite blast. Since then, ten more towers in a region that stretches 140 miles east of Portland have been dynamited--three of them toppled. Another three were found with attached explosive devices that had failed to go off. Clearly, somebody was out to sabotage the facilities of the Bonneville Power Administration, the federally owned agency that provides 80% of the electric power used in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana.

In a neatly typed three-page letter addressed to BPA but brazenly sent to the Portland office of the FBI, the dynamiters threatened to continue their bombings until the agency forked over $1 million in ransom money. "We have the men and equipment to keep as many towers down as is necessary to force compliance with our demands," the letter warned. "Our intent is to either collect $1 million or to make you people wish to hell we had." The message was signed "J. Hawker"--an apparent reference to the antislavery jayhawkers, who looted and marauded in Kansas, Missouri and other states before and during the Civil War.

Alarmed BPA officials immediately ordered ground and helicopter surveillance of the more than 6,000 transmission towers that stand within a 50-mile radius of Portland. But the four states served by the Columbia River electro-grid contain some 62,500 towers, a fragile network that is impossible to protect completely. Once again an almost Mission: Impossible problem exposed the vulnerability to terrorism of complex industrial societies.

Four counties in Washington and Oregon put into effect an emergency preparedness plan, devised in 1970, that calls for erecting a command post to coordinate emergency power needs at a remodeled bomb shelter in the Kelly Butte area of Portland. The Red Cross installed a bank of phones for use if the current "standby alert" for a Portland-area disaster goes "red." Two of the Pacific Northwest's largest users of electricity, Reynolds Metals in Oregon and Alcoa in Washington, are particularly threatened. A power cutoff of five hours would wreak such havoc that, Reynolds estimates, it would cost the company $7 million to start up its plant again.

With such stakes, the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the BPA, offered $100,000 for information leading to the capture and conviction of the extortionists and announced that it had no intention of paying the $1 million ransom. There was good reason. Said BPA Administrator Don Hodel: "The real hostage in any attempt to cut off energy supplies is society itself. When you kidnap energy, you endanger every facet of human life. That's why we can't let it be shown for all the would-be criminals and mental cases to see that J. Hawker can succeed."

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