TMI 35 years later
"I grew up in Bainbridge, PA. That’s about three miles south of Three Mile Island. Our roots are very deep in this area. Mine go back ten generations in a little five-mile radius. We built this property out in the countryside where we raised two children. We were self-sufficient for many years, raising chickens, ducks, geese, sheep herd, all the crops we needed. I canned and froze foods for winter."
"We fence in anything we want to grow. Now all our animal herds and flocks are down to just the wild turkeys, the wild deer who have adopted us and our three miniature donkeys. The rest all come and go."
"We have a nice relationship here with nature, although we can no longer call us [sic] homesteading people and family. We have such an appreciation that developed over those early years. I think, as we get older, it’s an even deeper feeling that you appreciate how nature has its role in each season – just how everything has to fit together."
"When this was built, we had no clue what was being built in our river. It was just magnificent in size. This is the future. This is cheap, clean energy that we’re gonna all know. People would come here to visit from other places and we would be talkin’ around a dinner table about ‘isn’t this something, right here in our backyard?’"
"Not guessing how this would put you on the map for a different reason. When you traveled even to Europe, someone would wonder where you’re from. And where I used to always be so proud to say Lancaster County, Pennsylvania – some of the best farmland in the world – they would know you’re from Three Mile Island. What a commentary, to go from being known in such a positive vein worldwide – Lancaster County soil is some of the best in the whole world— and this is what we were known for."
“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 went away after this accident only because we felt there just wouldn’t be anything we could actively do. The children’s school was closed. We left animals in care of a neighbor who was staying behind. All the [kids] worried about was their animals when we left. We were with friends at a vineyard down [in] Lancaster. So we went down in a truck and we stopped at a little restaurant to have a coffee and I heard [about] a Three Mile Island accident and ‘facts are not known.’ We rushed to the friends and I said: ‘Give me a shot of whiskey, quick.’ I called my sister. Her little boy was a baby. I said: ‘Get the children out of school and go over to dad’s ‘till we get back and just get your radio on and see what’s happening.’ So that’s how it began."
“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.”
"As Three Mile Island unfolded, we were questioning like so many people because our science books had not trained us about nuclear power. If it did, it was a paragraph in your textbooks. We felt fully confident that we would just come back to life as we had known it all before. That, unfortunately, didn’t happen. I thought, in my naiveté back then, why can’t we go down to the Bainbridge School? I’ll just get the gym open. We’ll put some posters on telephone poles. I’ll invite the head people at the Island, the head people of our civil defense– just key people – and get them all together in one room. Then we definitely can go back to life as we knew 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.”
"Well, that evening went very well. It was very organized. Four hundred-plus people showed up. You couldn’t even get into the room, so, you knew this is a large issue. This is bigger than any of us. Questions were answered – none really completely. The Civil Defense fellow was asked, ‘What would happen if this accident occurred again? What would happen to the people?’ And his response was, ‘Well, we would worry about the people downwind because it’d be too late for the others.’ You can only imagine the uproar."
“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.”
"The next day, it was all over the Lancaster newspapers. It was on the radio stations. I would say that night was the beginning – April 30, 1979 – of a whole new chapter in my life and in the life of my family and most people. Like when Kennedy died— you remember where you were. People will always remember where they were during those first few days. So very few of us were able to continue on with that chapter becoming many chapters."
“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 had people sign the petition early on to present at the next meeting. [A PA House Representative] was pressured, well he called me and said ‘would you put together one?’ I had two, three weeks to do it. It’s going to be called a House Select Meeting. From 4 PM to 10 PM [there was] non-stop testimony down in that Bainbridge gymnasium. I don’t think I had politician in the bunch. Well, you can imagine that was all over the papers. It was huge and it just really rocked the boat. Well after that one, they felt we should have several of them."
I thought I would have
no problem [getting signatures]. Well, I was surprised. [Some people] were anabaptist, they don’t go to war. ‘Oh I couldn’t sign that. God will take care of us.’ In a conservative area like this, you have a lot of that feeling. No matter what would happen, it’s all sort of testaments that God’s gonna look after his own. That always surprised me. And some people are afraid that the IRS would come after them. Being so conservative, they never rocked the boat. You would never [do that] before this happened.
"Early on I was labeled an anti-nuclear leader. In the first couple of weeks someone came up to me in the grocery store and said, ‘Well I just want you to know I’m pro- nuclear.’ She probably had no idea what that meant. It became very polarizing."
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.
"My father was asked down in Bainbridge: ‘What’s going on with your daughter? Can’t you control what your daughter’s doing?’ He was upset about it and I said, ‘Well, sorry dad but this is what I believe and I’m gonna stand up for it and you know how it’s gonna be.’ I wasn’t attacked much. We have a pretty strong name. We are pretty strong minded to start with. You stand up with what you believe."
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.
"The first wonderful weekend after winter and guys were out breaking up leaves, We had a meeting and Mary Osborne brought the map. I think she had it and I brought push pins. Over 200 people came to that meeting. As they came in, we had them put where they lived. I may have been the one to ask about the rash and ‘how many, if any of you, have that experience?’ Many different people had the rash."
"This is an event in the life of this area that has affected many of us, and it will go on affecting us for generations. There has been a sad story in almost every family across the river where the plume evidently went during the accident—in the little town of Goldsboro. The people affected— when a child, herself or someone in the family is diagnosed with cancer of any kind, the immediate response is: it must be Three Mile Island. All I’m certain of is we have way too much cancer in the little town of Bainbridge where I grew up, where we held that very first meeting."
"I still act like I really believe in everybody but I am so cynical. After all these experiences, you know how people respond to big money. When they are on the receiving end anything can happen. It’s just the lobbying. It is worse at every turn and as we researched this – the billions at stake and the money involved, I mean, that’s what it’s all about. Until you resolve where the waste is going to reside you do not go forth. You know the risk. It’s huge. They cry foul when we don’t have the money for any of these retrofits or changes, even if they make what they have better and yet wanna hold on and extend the life of what they are doing. It doesn’t make any sense."
"When I met [this NRC rep], instead of feeling real anger for him, I felt pity because I saw in his eyes [that] there was a sadness. I think he must be about 80, and who’s calling you? You know you’ve reached the end of your career, probably coming to the end of your life and I saw this – it shocked me. He just wanted to talk and of course he realized, then, my background and story and how important this area is to me. I thought ‘oh mercy what has happened here?’ [Maybe] he just wanted to talk and maybe I’m the first quiet voice here. Maybe that took him off guard to just have [a] quiet one-on-one. I sensed all of these early players feel some remorse, and I think any intelligent thinking person has to after all those years of what has now been known. They have to feel something."
"I would never have guessed that 35 years later that I would still feel this strongly and have continued to keep a filing system wherever I see something pertinent [to TMI]. I have kept it safe so that I could share with any researchers who come here and want to use that. I eventually hope to do something on my own with it. I have felt that it is my duty to learn all I can and to document all I can."
"I always feel it’s an incredibly high risk that we have been asked to accept to get the electric. But there’s a risk in everything we do. No matter what kind of energy source, there’s always some risk. But to have a population absorb that huge a risk? How easy it would be for a terrorist to bomb that site, for [a] natural occurrence of leaking into the Susquehanna and then the Chesapeake Bay – just the many factors that are there."
"And when it doesn’t, you see what can go wrong. When Three Mile Island happened, we felt strongly about that as an issue because of the fact that we were so in tune with our surroundings. It just
seemed like such a negative in what we thought of
as a very positive way of living."
Story of a Local Farmer:
Pattie Longenecker
"We have an island in the middle of the Susquehanna River in a flood plane on which my grandmother’s cousins grew the best melons in this whole area—until they sold to the utility after a big flood. I think it was 1936 or ’38. There we already have a risk when you put something of this magnitude."
"I doubt that Unit 1 is ever gonna come to meltdown. But who knows? If that were to happen, all of these generations of hard workers who created farms out of this good soil, it would be lost because our insurance policies have a disclaimer for anything nuclear. We’ve got rich dairy farms, a lot of beef farmers, a lot of crop farmers who supply all the farmers markets. This pocket has seen such productivity and such history that we have contributed to build a nation from. Is this how we say thank you to those ancestors and give such a risk for the benefit of people’s electricity far away that will never know where its source even was?"
"I think the only lesson learned were how corporations have the funding to create the outcome for themselves. A bigger lesson over time I would hope would be to not build anymore nuclear plants—that we look to Germany for their leadership, who sees that we should not be building what we can’t control. I’m just thankful that we’ve had wonderful leaders in this search for truth all these years [that] have really, I feel, made the difference for some."
"We just have to stand for what you believe and, at the end of my chapters, if I made a difference so be it. At least I can live my life knowing I tried. I think I’m blessed to be able to have that freedom of choice. And if we did [fight], like we did in the beginning in that first year, then I think we would have conquered it."