WOODINVILLE, Wash. – Custom home builder Grey Lundberg shook his head as the charred remains of a $2 million dream house, built with recycled waste wood and other eco-friendly products and then apparently torched by radical environmentalists.
His company, CMI Homes, had taken pains to design and build the 4,000-square-foot house with enough environmentally features to win it a five-star “Built Green” rating.
But a sign left at the scene of the fire bore the initials of a radical environmentalist group that mocked the cluster of five homes as “McMansions” that didn’t deserve the high marks.
“It’s just so ironic. I can’t even begin to fathom that mentality,” Lundberg said. “We were trying to demonstrate a better way to build out here.”
Three seven-figure homes were destroyed early today north of this rural suburb northeast of Seattle, apparently set by ELF, for Earth Liberation Front, a loose collection of radical environmentalists that has claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks since the 1990s.
The sheriff’s office estimated that today’s pre-dawn fires did $7 million in damage to the “Street of Dreams,” a row of unoccupied, furnished luxury model homes where tens of thousands of visitors last summer eyed the latest in high-end housing, interior design and landscaping. Three homes were destroyed and two suffered minor fire or smoke damage.
Crews removed incendiary devices found in the homes, Snohomish County District 7 Fire Chief Rick Eastman said. Later, however, Kelvin Crenshaw, special agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Seattle, said there was no evidence such devices had been used.
The FBI was investigating the fires as a potential domestic terrorism act, said FBI spokesman Rich Kolko in Washington, D.C.
No injuries were reported in the fires, which began before dawn in the wooded subdivision and were still smoldering by early afternoon.
The sign left behind said in red scraggly letters, “Built Green? Nope black!” and “McMansions in RCDs r not green,” a reference to rural cluster developments.
The Building Industry Association of Washington and the FBI were offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible.
One alleged ELF activist is on trial in Tacoma in the 2001 firebombing of the University of Washington’s Center for Urban Horticulture. Investigators had no evidence linking the fires to the trial, Seattle FBI agent Fred Gutt said.
The homes that burned were between 4,200 and 4,750 square feet, and on sale at prices up to nearly $2 million.
“If you just stop and think about the lives that you’re touching when you do something like this, it’s unbelievable selfishness,” Lundberg said.
Advertising for last summer’s Street of Dreams focused on the environmentally friendly aspects of the homes, which were smaller than some of the houses featured in years past.
The homes are in a development near the headwaters of Bear Creek, which is home to endangered chinook salmon. Opponents of the development had questioned whether the luxury homes could pollute the creek and an aquifer that is a drinking water source, and whether enough was done to protect nearby wetlands.
ELF is known for trying to cause economic damage to companies or organizations it considers to be harming the environment. The group has no organized structure or leadership; typically, autonomous cells of activists take “direct actions” such as arsons and claim responsibility on behalf of ELF.
Since 1990, more than 1,200 criminal acts in the U.S. have been attributed to ELF and its sister organization, the Animal Liberation Front, said FBI spokesman Bill Carter.
Most notorious was a 2003 fire that destroyed an apartment complex near the University of California, San Diego, causing $50 million in damage.
In 2005 and 2006, federal authorities charged more than a dozen people involved in an ELF cell known as “the Family” and centered near Olympia, Wash., and Eugene, Ore. The group was responsible for at least 17 fires around the West from 1996 to 2001 – including the 1998 destruction of a lodge at the Vail ski resort in Colorado, a fire that caused $12 million in damage.
A federal jury in Tacoma was deliberating today in the case of another accused ELF activist. Briana Waters could face at least 35 years if convicted of helping to firebomb the UW horticulture building in 2001.
Waters’ lawyer, Robert Bloom, asked the judge to declare a mistrial this morning, citing the possibility that the fires – and their ensuing publicity – could influence the jury.
“It is inconceivable that anybody who is supporting Briana’s case could have been responsible for this,” Bloom said.
The judge rejected Bloom’s request.
Waters, a 32-year-old violin teacher from Oakland, Calif., is accused of serving as a lookout while her friends planted the firebomb, which caused $7 million in damage. The horticulture center was targeted because the ELF activists mistakenly believed researchers there were genetically engineering trees, investigators said.
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Associated Press writer Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington, D.C., and Gene Johnson in Seattle contributed to this report.