In his Sunday News column “The media and the meltdown”, Gil Smart reminisces: “I was 11 years old when Three Mile Island became a household term, my brother 9, my sister two months from being born. We fled to New York to stay with my grandparents. I didn’t understand the complexities of what was happening; what child could? But I had the creeping sense of running away from a monster, from something seeping toward us like a spreading, metastasizing virus.”
I was 42 years old, standing in a line to purchase tickets for a flight from Charleston, WV to Harrisburg, PA when I overheard a couple of ‘suits’ in rapt conversation about the news coming from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. Since I had heard some accounts of problems with the reactors, I found their conversation sufficiently alarming to interrupt with a question:
“We live about twenty miles from Three Mile Island in Lancaster County. Is there any reason for me to be concerned about danger to my family?” One of the men said “We’re nuclear engineers on leave to provide advice. If my family were within twenty miles, I would get them out of there as quickly as possible.”
I exited the line, found a pay phone, called my wife and said “Please pack some bags and you and the kids should drive to the Philadelphia airport and take a flight out to Los Angeles to visit with your family. Please do this within the hour.”
She did and for years afterwards I took a ribbing for having over re-acted. Much later I learned that a partial melt down had occurred and we had been only a half an hour from possibly a Chernobyl type disaster. Then I felt better about our actions.
Post script: Editor Marv Adams also knowingly discusses the TMI event in his column “The chill of March.”
