Practice Blackout

Seattle had a practice 15-minute blackout last week. At the appointed hour (10:40 p.m.), lights in houses, hotels, stores, non-defense factories throughout the city winked out. Seattle's 400,000 citizens had a grand time, a fine sense of civic fellowship. Beyond that, Seattle's dark hour mostly proved that i) blackout or no, Seattle's precisely patterned areas along Lake Washington, Lake Union, Green Lake, Puget Sound and the Duwamish River waterways would be an easy mark for bombers; 2) like any other industrial area designed for peacetime, Seattle could achieve a complete blackout only by shutting down its vital defense works (shipyards, Boeing Aircraft, steel mills kept going, with lights on).

Police had half expected a run of rowdyism, vandalism, false fire alarms. Only police call: a report that a man was beating his wife.

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