Little Noticed (RWC)

Talk about “retro”! The news these days reminds me of 1967 not 2007.  Case in point:

Authorities last week found a series of three bombs hidden in the aqueduct that supplies water to millions of people in Southern California. 

If you have ever driven out through the far San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles heading towards Bakersfield, you have passed the huge California Aqueduct which carries water from Northern California into the naturally arid South.

When I was a young reporter in California in the 1960’s not a fortnight would go by when I wouldn’t read an intelligence report of a bombing attempt by radicals against power transmission lines, city reservoirs, electrical substations or the California Aqueduct. 

I mean think of the “Weathermen” or the “Symbionese Liberation Army” –which, by the way wasn’t much of an army. In fact it was much less than a platoon, more the size of a squad -and made up of crazy, self-important Berkeley leftists, more than half of them girls, and most of them killed along the way.  But their legacy seems to linger.

The latest incident received little attention from the media, but the pipe-bombs were planted next to a large valve at a branch of the aqueduct in the Mojave Desert North of LA. They were discovered by police who have made frequent checks for such things since 9/11. It was successfully disarmed.

Comments

[Roland Dodds]

Pretty astounding that I didn’t hear about this anywhere but here.