Here is what happened last night, June 1, 1970. We had a fire that burnt down the warden’s home, the old clinic, and the old lighthouse building. All that is left of the lighthouse building or the lighthouse is a long skinny thing with a light on the end that sticks up in the air. That is all that was burned. The next question was how did the fire start, do you know? No, we don’t know that. All we know was that at about 10:30 last night that it started and that it finally died out this morning. We tried to keep the lighthouse from going, but it went, and there was nothing we could do about it. We didn’t have any water to fight it with and by the time the Coast Guard came it was too late for them to do anything, so we didn’t let them come on the island. They asked if they could land. We told them no and they stayed off, away from the shore. They couldn’t save the buildings, they were already too far gone to be saved.
We didn’t know if they were going to try to take us off the island and we didn’t want all of those government people running around at night, so we just kept them off. We’ve got it all under control. Everyone got a little more excited about it than we did. We moved all the women and kids into one building away from the fire, and we decided to just let it burn out. We made an attempt to stop the lighthouse fire. We couldn’t do that, so we just let it all go. I heard this morning, one of the reporters from the Associated Press told me that a man by the name of Laws, with the GSA, said that we started the fire and I don’t know anything about that, and I would like to say right now, there have been no Coast Guard or GSA personnel on the island, so he cannot say that because he doesn’t know. But this is the kind of thing that he [Laws] is putting out right now. I think the fire just got started and the whole deal is like, the way I look at it is, the fire did us a favor. It just burned down two buildings that we were going to have to tear down, and that’s exactly the way it is. We are going to be in dire need of water here now, because we had some water in the tank but when the clinic burned down it ruptured a couple of pipes and we have been losing water most of the night and I don’t know how much we have left. I don’t think we will have any left, not at the rate we were losing it. People can bring it down to our loading dock there next to Castagnolas, down on Fisherman’s Wharf, and if the people have boats and they want to come, they can bring water and we will let them land. ~
SOURCE: Johnson, Troy R, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, 1996.