The Earth Liberation Front (ELF), the most active environmental extremist movement in the United States, has claimed responsibility for an attack that damaged two radio towers in Everett, WA, on September 4, 2009. Everett is located about 25 miles north of Seattle, in Snohomish County.
The perpetrators knocked down the towers, one of which was 349 feet tall, using a piece of heavy construction equipment already on the site. ELF's initials were left at the scene of the attack.
Local AM radio station KRKO erected the towers in 2008 after more than a decade of legal action by environmental activists, who maintain that AM radio waves cause adverse health and environmental effects. Other members of the community expressed concern about signal interference on telephone and intercom lines. Despite the local opposition, plans for two additional towers to be built at the same site are underway.
A spokesperson from the North American Earth Liberation Front Press Office, which shares information and statements from extremist cells that commit criminal activity, applauded the attack in a press release issued the same day: "When all legal channels of opposition have been exhausted, concerned citizens have to take action into their own hands to protect life and the planet."
The radical environmental rights movement has a history of targeting privately-owned electrical equipment that it believes may either be harmful to the environment or profitable for companies it deems environmentally irresponsible.
For example, in May 2008, Eric McDavid was sentenced to nearly 20 years in federal prison for conspiring to destroy federal property and commercial property, including cellular telephone towers and electric power stations, in California. McDavid was the mastermind behind the plot, which involved two co-conspirators and also intended to target the U.S. Forest Service Institute of Forest Genetics, the Nimbus Dam and Fish Hatchery, banks and commercial trucks.
On May 25, 2007, Chelsea Dawn Gerlach was sentenced to nine years in federal prison for her role in a series of ecoterror attacks, including the toppling of an 80-foot transmission tower outside Bend, Oregon, in 1999. Gerlach carried out the attacks as a member of "The Family," a group of more than a dozen suspects indicted in 2006 in connection with a series of firebombing attacks. Their targets included U.S. Forest Service ranger stations, Bureau of Land Management wild horse facilities, meat processing companies, and lumber companies.
