TMI 35 years later
"My dad was in the military. He served with the Air Force and also the Army; he was a chef. So, he was stationed in different places and ended up at Alamogordo, New Mexico when they were making the atomic bomb. He was feeding the officers that were making the bomb, like Oppenheimer and others. It is incredible to go from Alamogordo to where we are now."
"When I was in junior high, there was a program [where] people from the nuclear industry came to give us a little education on this new, safe energy. We had a science book that showed Hermann Muller’s fruit flies that were given radiation through experiments and they were mutated and then below was a flower and half of it was white and the other half was red. Arnold Sparrow, who was at Brookhaven Lab, did the radiation research on the plants. I never forgot it— it freaked me out."
"Friday morning I didn’t know what we were going to do. Around 9:30, all of a sudden sirens were ringing and the church bells were ringing all over the place and it sounded like an air raid; it was really scary. I turned my radio on and the guy on WHP [was] saying that they were having uncontrolled radiation releases and it was 1200 millirems over the stack."
"The morning of the accident, my husband was putting tools in his truck and I was making breakfast. He said to go outside and smell the air. So I go into the driveway. At that time there was almost no wind, and I had this weird metallic taste. I couldn’t tell if it was in my nose or my mouth or whatever, it was just like I was breathing it, and it was really weird. There were no birds. The day before, the birds were all over the place; they would chatter really early in the morning. I didn’t see or hear any birds and I didn’t really think much of it."
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
"I get my daughter ready for school and around 8:00 we walk over to the bus stop at the corner. There wasn’t any metallic taste in the air. But later, my son was outside playing and we went up to the neighbor’s house and I was talking to the neighbor. When we came home to change his diaper I noticed his hands and face were red and my face and hands were a little red, too."
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
"I got a phone call from my husband’s sister saying they had an accident and tells me to be careful. I go look out my window and I don’t see anything wrong. I was aware of it, but I thought I was far enough away. Later that night, Walter Cronkite talks about this nuclear accident. He says the world was on alert for whatever’s happening here."
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
"My neighbor across the street worked at [a] hotel and she said reporters were calling from all over the world to have a place to stay because of the accident at TMI; they wanted to come in and check the story out. Later that day, Bill Scranton goes on TV and says that the company told them everything was under control. About a half hour later he goes back on TV and says that we've been misled, we've been lied to— the accident is more severe than we were led to believe— and he was really angry."
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
"We were calming [the kids] down. More people were coming and stayed at the same house we were. I listened to the radio almost the whole night trying to hear some of the stuff that was going on. My son got a little bit sick. It wasn’t an issue that [sic] I thought of radiation, it was more like a stomach problem or something, but later I figured out it probably was. We came back home on Saturday, the week later, because the kids were so cranky and tired and everybody was really messed up."
“Well, I had only been there for 5 weeks. I’d just gotten the job [and] moved here. No one was ordering me to cover [TMI]. For the first night I went down, I went down to see it— I had a friend and I asked him to drive me down. There were people in moon suits taking radiation readings the first night.”
"At that time, I didn’t know enough about what happened. They were having public meetings after a while with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It started out just a few and then all of a sudden every week it was a meeting here or there. I attended a whole lot of them. I’d hear [that] a lot of people had the metallic taste and some were throwing up, some had diarrhea, some had hair loss and we had hair loss, too. When I gave my son a bath the Saturday we came home there was a wad of hair in the bathtub and I saw his scalp, it was clear. When I brushed my daughter’s hair when she went back to school a whole lot of it came out in the hairbrush."
"I didn’t know what was going on and I didn’t really trust the government anymore. I went to Three Mile Island Alert. I became a member because I wanted to know what was going to happen to us. What would you do if your children’s hair fell out? What would you do if it happened to your child? [There were] about 10 or 12 of us, I don’t remember how many, we all worked at different areas to go door-to-door and I was assigned Goldsborough. We didn’t have that much, but the others, Margie and her husband, did the report and it was made public and we went to D.C. Almost everybody was willing to participate. They really wanted to say what happened."
"We planned on getting arrested. We had a meeting at my house. We met with lawyers planning on what to do. It was nonviolent civil disobedience and we all made a banner to shut down Three Mile Island. We all had a piece of it, we held onto it and walk[ed] across and blocked the gates at Three Mile Island. When the state police car drove into the area where we were, I looked away because I wasn’t going to move. It was less than two inches from my legs. That’s how close they came to almost hitting me because they were zooming in."
So Denton had a press conference at about 10 o’clock on a Friday night. They used to have an old media center— really small room up on top floor of the capitol. And I can remember waiting for that. The click of the cameras… in the old days, the cameras would make a clicking noise and it was almost intense the way he walked out there; no one had seen him [before]. He was able to start relaying information in a more folksy style. A calming style from the start. Denton was a real change in terms of just trying to understand it. I had no reason to doubt him.
The UPI, the United Press, was talking about a meltdown fear. It was later, I think, later on you were getting the [hydrogen] bubble story. [It] was developing later that day maybe even. So that might have been what Denton was addressing when he first got here, into that Saturday and Sunday.
"It was one of the neatest things I’ve ever done in my life. We were protesting the restart. We had a vote and the people, the majority of the people all over the area that voted, voted no. They wanted a shut down, but it was a non-binding referendum, which meant it didn’t matter. But the sheer fact that the people wanted it shut down it should have been enough to keep it shut down."
So Denton had a press conference at about 10 o’clock on a Friday night. They used to have an old media center— really small room up on top floor of the capitol. And I can remember waiting for that. The click of the cameras… in the old days, the cameras would make a clicking noise and it was almost intense the way he walked out there; no one had seen him [before]. He was able to start relaying information in a more folksy style. A calming style from the start. Denton was a real change in terms of just trying to understand it. I had no reason to doubt him.
The UPI, the United Press, was talking about a meltdown fear. It was later, I think, later on you were getting the [hydrogen] bubble story. [It] was developing later that day maybe even. So that might have been what Denton was addressing when he first got here, into that Saturday and Sunday.
"We did have a trial. The judge found us guilty and fined us $10. The $10 thing was really significant; the judge was on our side. I would’ve pleaded not guilty and sued or gone for another trial to take care of it, to say all the stuff that was horrible, but I couldn’t do it, having the kids. I couldn’t leave them."
"The first lawsuits settled for [$2.35] million. Debby Baker was pregnant during the accident, and she had a baby born with Down Syndrome. She helped when $3.9 million for 83 people and all of those had children involved and it was made public. If [it] didn’t have children involved, it wouldn’t have to be public. The second round after this was the people who had cancers and other illnesses. Judge Rambo threw out all the expert witnesses except one guy. They ignored a lot of stuff. Columbia’s studies kept saying there were increases in cancer. They said not enough radiation got out to cause the effects. The government repeatedly said that, but that’s not the case."
"When they were doing the cleanup, when the wind blew my way, I almost always had a sore throat or a burning on my lips. For over 10 years of clean up, they were releasing radiation repeatedly in the river and in the air. Anytime I saw something, I [would] either take a picture or pull it in, dry it, or press it and I have a lot of stuff."
"Being involved and attending meetings, I had to have my sister or my mother-in-law take care of the kids. Maybe that’s why my son didn’t turn out as perfect… I would even take him to some of the meetings. One time, when Eileen and Mitsuro did their presentation, I tape recorded it and at the very end I hear him saying ‘Mommy, I'm tired, I want to go home.’ I should have been home a little bit more. You have those kind of regrets. I had the kids and I could only do what I could do, then I had to work. But I'm still doing it and I'm really stuck because the government has lied repeatedly, they mess things up, they withheld information."
"When Three Mile Island came here, we didn’t think anything of it. They had union problems in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s and people were losing their jobs. There was almost nowhere to go for work and so, the people in the unions that we knew, they all went down to TMI to work; there was no place else to get a better job and nobody thought anything about the danger of a nuclear power plant."
Story of a Plant Collector:
Mary Stamos
"When my husband worked there he did construction, and we had friends that worked there. A year before the accident, Terry, who was an electrician, stopped by my house in the middle of the afternoon and told me Three Mile Island was taking so many shortcuts it was never going to make it. He was real upset."
Check out some pictures of mutations, courtesy of Mary.
"I’m still doing everything I can do. [It’s been] 35 years. Half of my life. I’m still active because I just believe that people have a right to justice. You need to be honest to the people. I just want the people that suffered to have their fair day in court. I want the government to admit that they killed people because of their deliberate actions of withholding information and covering up what happened. I want the truth to be told."
"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission people have lied so much. Not all of them, but so many of them have lied. We had this event a year or two ago, Scott was there and he asked questions and the lady didn’t even answer; a lot of these new people don’t know anything about any nuclear power plant other than the basics. It’s like they’re not reading history or nobody is telling them Three Mile Island even existed. They’re coming to a meeting here in Harrisburg and they can’t even answer the questions people are asking."
"I didn’t have a car that day and when the sirens went off I talked to my neighbor and she said ‘We can leave.’ She took me to my daughter’s school to pick her up. The teachers were really upset because they couldn’t leave until the kids were out, but they had their own kids to get. [My husband] came and picked us up and then we left and went to a friend’s house 50 miles away, near State College."