Performance Notes This is a great story, made greater by the fact that it was not invented.
True stories are always better. With fiction, the story teller is limited
to his or her imagination. Actual events have no such pain in the ass restrictions.
And since we're all lucky to have survived the accident......er...I mean
"incident" at TMI, do tell it with gusto and have some fun.
Cast
Balladeer
Balladeer (sings)
It's been 25 years now
It was fear that clings to you
invisible sky it falls asleep
I stay here because
It's been 25 years now
Male Resident (serving as narrator now to introduce the play) I used to think I wanted to be a writer. But I could never finish things. I’d start a million stories, but I never knew how to end any of them. Everything I came up with was so clichéish. That’s the problem with fiction. It always sounds like fiction, if you know what I mean. Things just get wrapped up too nicely. There’s always somebody that’s the obvious bad guy….and then there’s the fragile hero. And in the end he gets the girl and everybody goes home and reads the paper and goes….."how come I can never find any of that stuff in here?" So you say….what about non-fiction? Why not write about that? Well, it’s messy that’s why. You can’t structure it. You bring non-fiction into the class room and the self important teacher will puff up his poetic chest and go…"there’s no plot…..these people aren’t believable….what is the theme…..what kind of ending is this?"…… We’re all taught that there are rules. If you obey, you’ll get along fine. If you don’t, you’ll get an F on your report card. But let me tell you…..it’s amazing what nearly being killed by massive doses of radiation can do to your backbone. And you know what? If radiation was something you could see….I might look like a leopard right now…..a cancer patient in waiting. Who can tell? Can you? You think it’s over? Did 9/11 end when the towers fell? I don’t care what all the professors think anymore. I’ve been liberated. And so, thanks to the passage of 25 years….have these people (he motions to the other actors on the stage) I think some of them are more anxious to tell their stories than others…..but I’m a persuasive fellow….as all writers of non-fiction must be. Some talked to me….and some made the mistake of talking too loudly to others…..and those people then talked to me (laughs). In retrospect….all this is kinda crazy. It’s like somebody telling you that the Manhattan project was being worked on next door….and everybody going…."well, as long as you’re quiet Dr. Oppenheimer". (laughs again) But we’re Eastern Pennsylvanian’s…right? Civil War…..floods….knock us down and we’ll get right back up. And as I like to say…."close enough to get there but far enough away to be left alone." (laughs) What we’re about to tell you is true. Every bit of it. If there are no clear cut villians….or heroes…..don’t blame the writer. Lets go back to March of 1979. Who wants to start? Woman Resident It’s amazing what you can get used to. We’re the closest home to Three Mile Island. It’s just across the river…..but with those cooling towers…well, it’s kinda like having the Empire State Building in your back yard. But….you gawk for a while….then maybe you steal a glance now and then….and finally you just put ‘em out of your mind. They become like the trees….part of the scenery. Life itself gives you enough to worry about. I was almost 4 in the morning when I heard it. It sounded like a jet flying right over the house….that’s the kind of noise it was. I remember the whole house shook…..and I really thought the windows were gonna break. But they rattled some and then it died down. And then it was quiet again. Well…except for our dog, who was going nuts. So I put a robe on and took her outside. And I looked across the river and saw what I always saw. It was quiet again….and the dog did her thing and we went back inside. It was almost like I dreamt it or something. Hard to explain, but it wasn’t any dream. You all know that now. I got back into bed and my husband hadn’t moved. Still snoring the wallpaper off the walls he was. Funny, but he never really slept that way again. I mean, after that night any little noise would wake him up. We joke about it now….that one of the things that these Nuclear Plants do is turn you into light sleepers. Child Resident Wherever we went it seemed like those towers followed us. We’d play games to see where we could go on our bikes where they’d disappear….but I was only allowed to go so far away from the house so unless we buried ourselves in the snow or something, they were always there. I used to think there was about 10 of ‘em, but I know it’s only 4. When things are that big sometimes you just count ‘em more than once I guess. Used to watch the after school movies on channel 16. They’d have Planet of the Apes week….you know, all them movies. Sometimes they’d have Elvis week and my Mom watched those. They were boring. But they had them Godzilla and King Kong movies too sometimes. And we used to talk about how big Godzilla was, and one day I said….."I bet he ain’t as big as them cooling towers"…..and nobody argued even though they always argued with me when I said something usually. But even Godzilla couldn’t be that big. Met Ed 40 million dollars is a lot of money….even for a company like ours…Metropolitan Edison. So…..you know…..if you can save that much by getting the unit up and running by a certain date….well…..you do it. You can’t ignore 40 million dollars. It’s like somebody leaving an elephant turd in the middle of the room. And we got a good rep. You gotta remember why we’re even in the picture here. The plant was supposed to be built in New Jersey. Jersey Central Power and Light. It was like a dead carcass….that place. Attracted all kinds… They already started as a matter of fact….but every 2 bit Vito Corleone wannabee from the neighborhood was trying to shake down the contractor. They’d pay one guy off and some other greaseball would show up the next morning. Construction in Jersey is like preaching in a whore house….and they were running out of money before the concrete was poured. So they just ate 20 million dollars and came to us. And that’s how we got to 3 Mile Island. But you gotta remember that this is a business too…..and it would be irresponsible to the shareholders not to do the best you can in every respect. Be safe mind you…..but be safe and smart. That’s what we always tried to do. End of year 1978 was the deadline…and we had her up and running by December 30th……a day early even. That was a happy boardroom, let me tell you that. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year too….right? But in retrospect that date is not gonna look good if you have problems. It was really bad PR for us later on. But you gotta get her on the line sometime…….so why not then? We’d get her up and on the line and then work the kinks out. And she was running for 3 months. We just took her down to find some leaks back in January….and by the end of March she was really hitting her stride. And she was running full blast by that time. Running nice and quiet. If she wasn’t running, she cost us half a million dollars a day. Adds up…..so now people were starting to relax. But you know….I got my Nuclear training from my time in the Navy….and it seemed to me that when you were relaxed is when the shit always seemed to hit the fan. Control Room Engineer You have to understand the mindset at the time. I spent my whole life working with Nuclear Energy….and all this China Syndrome stuff was like your Mom telling you about the boogey man. You know…it just wasn’t real….or rather the scenario that could make it real simply did not exist. You know…..how can the core get to 5200 degrees? People would laugh about it. And then this movie comes out…..2 weeks before we had our problem here. Can you believe that for free publicity? And to us, the movie was like science fiction. I mean, we were more interested in seeing Jane Fonda take her clothes off than what Jack Lemmon was moaning about. To us, it just seemed like another cheap shot at the industry. And we sat through the whole 2 hour movie and Jane didn’t get naked once. Felt like asking for my money back. But you know….we had back-ups of our back-ups…..and we trained for every conceivable scenario. I mean, the containment building was designed to withstand a jet aircraft flying into it. That’s the way we were all thinking. We could survive anything. And so……..when we were faced with this thing……I mean we’d look at what our instruments were telling us and say…"that’s just not possible"….…like it was all a bad dream that we were gonna wake from. The instruments were telling us that maybe the core was exposed, you know….we were getting close to a catastrophe…but the mind only went so far in that direction before it moved somewhere else. And so we said…"the instruments are wrong". I heard horror stories of pilots blindly trusting their instruments and driving the plane straight into the ground. We’d been through events before, issues arise all the time…and we’ve had to SCRAM her….but now everything we were looking at was screaming out…..you know….screaming out words that we’d never heard before. If was like all of a sudden waking up and everybody started talking to you in a foreign language. I’ve got a wife….kids. This place has given me a good living. I’m able to live the way I want to live. Buy the kind of house I always wanted to buy. Eastern PA…it’s beautiful around here. Quiet. Things don’t move too fast….which is good. Things were good, you know? And then in an instant that was gonna be taken away, and it was probably more than a lot of us could comprehend at the time. Local Reporter This was a low budget operation. Our traffic reporter didn’t have a helicopter like everybody has today…..so instead he’d get in his car and look for the tie-ups. And you’d always keep your ears peeled to the scanner….you get lots of tips that way. If all else fails and you’ve got nothing you can call the State Police and beg them for some news. You do what you can with what you got. But that morning the scanner was crackling…..fire trucks and police cars were being mobilized in Middletown. And I called around, and nobody is saying anything. They’re all saying they don’t know anything about it. So I got our traffic guy on the radio and told him that something was up. And right at that time he says to me….."uh…..there’s no steam coming out of the cooling towers…that’s kind strange don’t you think?" The steam was like a permanent cloud that hung over the place….you just got used to seeing it. And now there wasn’t any. Control Room Engineer The control room was just getting too damn crowded by now. There were about 50 guys in there. You couldn’t think…..everybody was yelling. It was madness. Everybody was trying to help….you know…..trying to feel useful and find out what we were up against, but there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing. And then we all heard it…..funny how guys are yelling back and forth and then this one little alarm goes off and everybody gets quiet. There was radiation in the control room. That meant there was a leak somewhere and radioactive gases were being released all over the plant. Let me tell you…..that cleared the control room. Everybody who didn’t need to be there was gone. It’s funny now in a way….I never saw guys move that fast. Local Reporter I called everybody I could think of….and couldn’t get any information. Finally, I just dialed the plant directly. I figured maybe some PR guy could give me some info. But the girl who answered the phone was so swamped with calls that she directs my call to the control room before I can even tell her who I am. So the guy picks up the phone…."Unit II" Control Room Engineer In the middle of all this some guy from the radio station calls! Like I didn’t have enough to worry about. I hung up on him. I told somebody next to me and he said…"maybe you won something…." Local Reporter I identified myself and asked if there was a problem. I could hear a tremendous commotion in the background…..you could tell something was up. But all the guy said was "I can’t talk now….we got a problem"…and hung up. This was getting good now. You could smell it. So now I call Met Ed headquarters directly. Met Ed Nobody was telling me shit. The last message I had was from about 7:15am….and it said that the unit was shut down to deal with a malfunction with a feed water pump…and that was that. No big deal. Just all precautionary stuff. I can’t tell you what I don’t know. Local Reporter So I get their PR guy on the phone and ask him what’s happening. He tells me there is a "general emergency" at the plant. Well…what the fuck does that mean? I don’t like the word emergency being used in relation to nuclear power…no matter how general the damn thing is….maybe it’s just me. He tells me it’s a red tape thing that’s required by the NRC when certain "conditions" exist. Well….what conditions would that be? It was like pulling teeth. Finally, the guy told me they had some problem with a pump and that the plant was shut down and they were working on it and that there is no danger to anyone. I wanted to believe him so I did. And we broke the story….and got on air that there was a "general emergency". And then our phones start ringing off the hook. Everybody asking what the hell a general emergency was. All we could tell them was….well….we had no idea. Control Room Engineer With radiation leaking…..that meant it could escape to the outside. So we declared a general emergency. It was the first time ever for a Nuclear Power Plant in the US. But we had a job to do….so we just grabbed our respirators and stayed put. Brave or stupid….sometimes there’s a fine line there. But it’s my job. You don’t just sign on for when things are good. We had to stop this thing. Funny time to be remembering this…..but I’m a bit of a history buff, and I remembered a quote from Thomas Jefferson…..he was talking about slavery…..but it fits perfect in what I’m trying to tell you now. He said it was like holding a wolf by the ears. You didn’t like it….but you didn’t dare let go either. That was us that morning in March. Male Resident General emergency my ass. Those bastards are over there on that island like a bunch of Frankenstein’s. Who knows what kind of weird shit they’re getting up to. And now this? Hey..we don’t just run from anything. Agnes came here and we stared that bitch down. She didn’t get the best of us. But now we’re supposed to run from…..what? You can see flood waters. You can watch the river rise. But this nuclear shit……you can’t see it. You can’t smell it. It could kill you right where you’re sitting and you’d never know what hit you. I called everybody I could think of. Busy signals all over the place. Nobody knew what was going on. I wouldn’t say panic was setting in……but lets just say that things were getting juicy around here when word came on the radio. Everybody kept saying…."but they said that nothing bad could ever happen…they said it was totally safe"….well, do you believe everything corporations say? If they told you it’d be fun to do a swan dive into the Susquehanna from the bridge on 83 would you go and do it? And this China Syndrome movie was scaring the hell out of folks too. I remember reading a review of the movie in Newsweek….as soon as it came out. One of those wacky right wing commentators….you know…..the ones who make Reagan seem like a liberal? Well, this guy writes about how terrible it is to create a danger and stir fears like that. He said a Nuclear plant was no more dangerous than sitting next to somebody who was having a smoke. I’d like to find that guy right now and give him a radiation enema. Then I’ll blow a puff of my Marlboro on him and ask him which one feels better. And of course something like this has to happen with a Republican in our statehouse too. Watergate proved what a pack of liars they all were. It was all adding up and making a bad day worse. Control Room Engineer Things were happening too fast….and it was all getting like pushing a boulder up hill. So many alarms were going off at once that we couldn’t respond to them all. Hell, we couldn’t even see them all the way the control room is laid out. Some of the most important ones are actually facing away from us….and I’d have to walk 50 feet from where I was to check the back of a panel across the room. It never really occurred to me before how screwed up these alarms were. I mean, I had to go across the room to check the coolant level…..but right in front of me was an alarm that would tell me if the guest elevator was stuck. It was like asking a pilot to walk to the back of the plane to check the altitude. Politician Let me just say this. The minute we got word that there was an accident at a Nuclear Power plant, I knew we were in another dimension politically. Without in some way being able to control events, or at the very least control how events are perceived…..we’re like infants. And I’ll tell you the truth, I felt like an infant too because I remember wanting to cry (laughs). Control Room Engineer We had to get in touch with the regional office of the NRC as part of the general emergency….they were in King of Prussia. We called and the office wasn’t opened yet. So we left a message on the answering machine…which must have been interesting to the person who first heard it. Potential Nuclear disaster is not the kind of thing you want to hear about before you get your coat off. Then we called our contact there at home, and got his wife. She told us that we just missed him by a few minutes……he was on his way to work. We called his beeper….but he decided not to pull over and find a phone because he was in busy traffic and he figured it could wait. It was like a Marx Brothers skit. It just kept getting more and more crazy. Meanwhile, the radiation level inside the containment dome was reading 10,000 rems per hour. I won’t bore you with the details…but if you spent about 2 minutes out there you’d be as dead as Julius Caesar. Politician You’re dealing with something that you can’t feel…..you can’t see it. You can’t taste it. You can’t even smell it. You say the word "radiation" and it’s like yelling "shark" at the beach. And you ask people what it is, and they’ll say…."well, I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s not good." So we needed to tell everybody that there had been no release of radiation from the plant. And that’s what Met Ed told me….so we called a press conference.. (stepping up to give statement) The Metropolitan Edison Company has informed us that there has been an accident at Three Mile Island unit number two. Everything is under control. There is and was no danger to public health and safety. And that seemed to calm everyone. And then no sooner had I got back to my office that I found out that what I had just said was complete bullshit. There had been an off site release of radiation. And from that moment on I wanted to kick the shit out of every Met Ed spokesperson that came near me. You couldn’t believe a word they said, and that made my job extremely difficult. You gotta remember….this is still the 1970s….and thanks to tricky Dick politicans are slightly behind snake oil salesmen in the trust department….and here we are trying to tell the truth and we end up lying anyway. It was not an auspicious beginning to say the least. Control Room Engineer I had to take some radiation readings…..so I sent some of the engineers out to take some measurements….and there’s supposed to be 14 radiation measuring devices available at all times…I mean, that’s a regulation. Well, turns out only 4 of them were working. One was put back all smashed, like somebody dropped it from the ceiling. Another was left in some supervisors office. And we’d keep checking the temperature readings….and the computer kept spitting out question marks…….it was only programmed to go to 700 degrees…nobody ever thought it could go higher than that….and when it got above that….well…..you got question marks on the paper….which was very helpful. At this point you started to wonder if anything was ever gonna go right again. Met Ed and Local Reporter Reporter: Why did the company wait 3 hours to warn area residents? Met Ed: There was no delay. We were carrying out normal plant procedures up to 7am. After the accid….er….incident….the safety systems functioned as they should have. Reporter: Can you tell us what happened? Met Ed: Well, it’s certainly unusual that the pressurizer relief valve stuck open….but that may have been compounded by some human error in the control room. But as I said, everything has been contained. Reporter: So you’re saying that not only does your equipment not work, but you have morons at the controls of your nuclear reactor? Met Ed: Now I’m not going to dignify that… Reporter: I live a mile from the plant. What exactly are you doing to protect my family? Met Ed: As I’ve said…things are falling off right now. The coolant injection systems are functioning properly. And we expect soon to be in the cold shutdown condition. Reporter: I’m still puzzled as to why you did not notify us of the danger for 3 whole hours? Isn’t that irresponsible? Met Ed: (exploding) Look….we didn’t injure anybody with this accident, we didn’t seriously contaminate anybody, and we certainly didn’t kill anybody! Reporter: Well, I know you’ve made me feel a whole lot better. Thank you… NRC We’re the Nuclear Regulatory Commision in Washington….we’re being told by Met Ed that everything was Ok….that things were getting better. We would have loved to ask the guys in the control room but we couldn’t get in touch with them. They only had 2 lines into there and we kept getting busy signals. So we’re dealing with Met Ed PR folks, who don’t know the difference between a nuclear reactor and the furnace in your basement. The only people who had a direct line to the control room were the insurance company. They had them tied up for hours….worried about their premiums going up. We were getting info by calling the control room of Unit one….and they’d send a runner over to unit two where the problem was…and of course the message would get all garbled and by the time we got information it was outdated. We might as well have been using carrier pigeon. Finally we sent some guys down there in a station wagon, 90 mile drive….and they went into the Turbine building, normally a perfectly safe place, and it’s deserted except for 2 guys with radiation suits and respirators on. Well…..that kinda said that there was something still very wrong here. And then we went to the control room….and everybody in there has got respirators on, and they’re trying to talk on the phone through these things….I heard a lot of "what? I’m sorry, I didn’t get that"….you know, it was impossible to talk with these things on. Control Room Engineer We got so fed up trying to talk that I’d pull the mask off and talk a million miles an hour to get the words out and then quick put the mask back on….and the guy from Met Ed at the other end would go…."uh….could you repeat that please?". And I’m like…."I’d rather not really". Not the best way to run a railroad…you know? And they’d say…"did you get the reading on the computer for this alarm…or that alarm?" And I had to tell ‘em that the printer could only print 1 line every 4 seconds….so with all the alarms going off…..it was about 2 hours behind. We finally stopped looking at the printer entirely ‘cause it started eating the paper….and one guy says…."fuck it, it must be an NRC issued printer." We didn’t have too much confidence in the NRC at this point. They seemed to be more interested in the bad PR this was causing than how many rems or radiation my ass might have been getting. National Press The wire was going crazy about some kind of emergency at Three Mile Island, which of course none of us here in New York City had ever heard of. The only thing we knew about Nuclear power was that it seemed to scare the shit out of Crosby Stills and Nash and Jackson Browne. But, this was getting too big to ignore….so we all wanted to go up there. But my managing editor ended up standing on a desk in the middle of the room and yelling…."which one of you knuckleheads has seen The China Syndrome." And I raised my hand ‘cause I had seen it the night before….hoping Jane Fonda would get naked but she didn’t. Anyway, he said…"ok…you saw the movie….then you’re going to Harrisburg." Well, I didn’t really want to go to Harrisburg, and I started hanging ‘round with anybody in the newsroom I even suspected of having a cough….hoping I might get sick. But, just like when I was a kid using my dad’s lighter to try to spike the thermometer, I could never pull off getting sick when I needed to. So that’s how I got assigned to the story. They figured I was the expert. And I was driving up there hoping that it wasn’t gonna end with the swat team blowing some dude away in the control room. Politician There was some other agency called the Bureau of Radiation Protection….and they were taking their own readings….flying over the reactor in a helicopter. And they come and tell me that Met Ed has been venting radioactive steam directly into the atmosphere for hours without telling anybody. I nearly had a seizure. I felt like I was dealing with the dumbest sons of bitches on the planet. Met Ed I got my ass chewed so bad by the Lt. Governor that I could barely sit down anymore. It was hard to get a handle on this thing, and I tried to tell them that whatever radiation readings they were getting….it wasn’t coming from the steam we were venting…but he wasn’t in the mood…quite frankly. Touchy bastard he was. Politician Here I am trying to stop a general panic from breaking out….and you could look with your own eyes and see this steam rising over the island. These guys needed a serious course in public relations. I said…."were you venting radiation?"….and he says….well, safe amounts only, nothing harmful. And I said…"did you inform the press?"….and he says…..I still can’t believe this….he says…"well, no…they didn’t ask." Met Ed I’m still trying to figure out how I became press spokesman for Met Ed. I got off the helicopter and was the first one they got to…..so they zeroed in. I had no idea how to deal with them. They were like a pack of wild dogs. I’m an engineer….for Christ sake. These guys don’t even know how to spell "nuclear" and they’re asking me how long before the Hiroshima blast. The more specific I got….the more it looked like I was trying to blow smoke up their ass. You better give the press some quotes they understand. If they have to do some thinking on their own…..they’ll come back and get you. And they did. Something like this….you gotta give the enemy a face. And they gave it mine. I was going through a divorce at the time….and I remember thinking…."my wife has gotta be loving this." Control Room Engineer The NRC was on the phone from Bethesda….where they had their emergency headquarters. And they told us that they had sent some guys. And in a few hours these keystone cop types showed up. I mean…..they’ve all got all the fancy radiation monitoring equipment, but they forget to bring batteries for it. And the mobile Van from the NRC that’s supposed to be able to go into the field and take readings……well they show up riding on one rim…’cause the tire is flat and they don’t have a spare. You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at this point. All that was left to complete the picture was to catch one of ‘em reading a textbook called "My Friend the Atom". NRC w/ Reporters National Reporter: Sir, you responded to a question asking how close the water came to the top of the rods with this statement…."I don’t know how close the water was to the top of the rods." If you don’t know…then how can you say whether or not we were close to a core meltdown? NRC: I guess….uh…..based on just an assortment of aspects of this incident that I’d say were where nowhere near it….in my judgment. At this point, we think the plant is in a very stable configuration and we think, from a system standpoint, that we understand very well what’s going on. Local Reporter: And the radiation levels? NRC: There is an instrument at the dome which I understand has reported a series of readings of some thousands of Rems per hour. But these readings seem to be inconsistent with the readings of other instruments, so I am inclined the think that we’ve got a faulty readout on that instrument. National Reporter: Uh huh. Well, that makes us all feel better I’m sure. Now sir, we’ve heard that the primary system failed, the secondary system failed, the valves failed, and that there was quite possibly human error. You say this was the most serious core damage you’ve ever had. How close did we come to a meltdown..to a China Syndrome? NRC: Oh, nowhere near, in my judgment. The chances of that happening are really very small….diminishingly small. Local Reporter: Sir….you and other members have constantly said "apparently", "we are not sure", "we think there is enough water", "apparently an abnormality occurred". Truth is….you have no idea what is really going on, do you? NRC And now, more good news. A memo surfaces at headquarters in Washington, concerning the very valve that malfunctioned at TMI. Turns out the same valve has malfunctioned 11 different times at different plants around the country……we had a safety guy working at a regional office in Chicago screaming about it for years…..and the guy got so pissed about being blown off about it that he flew to Washington on a Saturday on his own time….paying for the trip out of his own pocket….to tell the brass at the NRC about it face to face. He spotted some guys from his office at the airport flying to DC on official business and covers his head with his jacket so they won’t see him. Well, it didn’t work ‘cause word gets out what he’s done, and he’s sitting in his office the next week just waiting to get the ax…..and then he finds out about the accident and says…."well, I guess that just saved my job." When his findings finally get looked at, they’re placed in some in-basket somewhere underneath a pile if expense reports or something…..you know…the classic bureaucratic cluster fuck. And meanwhile my headache is getting worse. Politician It was becoming apparent that….as confused as we were with all the contradictory statements coming out of there…..it must be worse for the public. At least we could ask questions. Even if you’re lied to in reply….you at least feel somewhat engaged being able to get somebody on the phone. But I told the governor that we needed to get somebody onsite to see firsthand what the hell was going on…..and he said…."great idea….give me a full report when you get back." I probably should have kept my mouth shut. So we called Met Ed….and they said…"great, we were going to invite some congressmen over…" and I stopped him and said that this wasn’t some grabass PR stunt. I wanted to go inside and see….you know….everything. I got the feeling that he thought I was nuts….but he didn’t try to stop me. So we drive over in a state car and they won’t let me take it past the gate due to the radiation, and I’m thinking……you’ll let me come in but not my car? And I’m led into some room where I have to put on a protective suit…..every inch of my skin is covered by this thing, and I got the booties on the feet and the respirator on…and it’s at this point that I’m beginning to question my political affiliation. It took me 45 minutes just to get this stuff on….and I’m thinking….would a Democrat do this? And we walk inside…and there’s this guy in front with a radiation meter on a long 10 foot pole….and it’s going wild, and they’re talking to me a mile a minute and I’m buried inside this space suit saying the Hail Mary. And I looked down., and there was a few inches of water on the floor. And the guy says to me…."see…it’s just like getting water in you basement"….and I said well..yea maybe, but I don’t usually have to dress up like Neil Armstrong to go down my basement. I laughed but he didn’t. Nuclear engineers don’t have a sense of humor. And that night when I got home, I was beat. So I got into bed and my wife said.."what do you think you’re doing?"…and I said…"what?". She said…."get your radioactive ass out of this bed and get on the couch.." Control Room Engineer (laughing) Oh man. I finally get to go home for a few hours….and I take like a 6 hour shower to scrub myself before I leave the plant….and when I get home I get into bed still wearing my rubber hat….gloves and booties. And my wife says…."if you think you’re gonna get me in the mood by wearing a body condom you’re out of your mind." Child Resident I was outside and I saw some men….looked like they were looking for something on the ground. I said…."can I help?" and they didn’t really answer so I figured whatever they were looking for they could find without me. Male Resident Jesus Christ….they’re telling us that everything is fine and now they send a couple of guys into town with Geiger counters? They said there was nothing to be alarmed about….that is was just a safety precaution. Safety precaution my ass. We’ll all be glowing in the dark soon…..and when that happens we won’t need any power around here anymore. We’ll all be generating our own. Politician I felt a little better now. Nobody over at the plant was in a panic….and all I could see was the water on the floor…and I should have known better but I was kinda lulled to sleep. Maybe we were gonna get through this after all. And when I get back the governor is talking about evacuation. I said…."what the hell is going on now?" NRC Dammit….now we’re hearing that a burst of radioactive gas had escaped from the containment building. Here we are in Bethesda….trying to figure out what the hell is going on in the control room 90 miles away. We’ve got the governor on the line….screaming at us. The operators at the plant are scratching their heads…pulling manuals off the shelf. Our guys onsite are out of reach. We kept sending guys down there but it was like a big black hole. They’d leave in another NRC station wagon and we’d never hear from ‘em again. We were running out of cars. You know….the governor’s information was ambiguous, but ours here was almost non-existent. We were like a couple of blind guys trying to pick out wallpaper. We figured we had to do something…..in case this was true about the gas. So we called the governor and told him to recommend moving pregnant women and pre-school children. Politician We had reviewed the state emergency plans…..and these things were designed by somebody that made the guys at Met Ed look like a pack of geniuses. Seems that the 2 counties on either side of the river were both told to evacuate towards each other…..so they’d meet head on in the middle of the bridge. My headache got worse. Ordering any type of evacuation was not only going to be a logistical nightmare…..but people could get hurt. I mean….that was a real possibility. And I swear I’m not making this up……but right in the middle of all this the civil defense alarm goes off all over the city. It sounded like the Roman legions were coming. Loudest thing I ever heard. The governor always chewed gum, and right then I noticed he swallowed what he had in his mouth. The governor got on the phone and found out that somebody had tripped it by mistake…..and he threatened to kill somebody himself if it didn’t get cut off. But the damage was done…. Woman Resident We heard this alarm and pretty soon there was fire trucks going up and down the street telling us to stay indoors and keep our doors and windows closed. I didn’t know that much about radiation but I had my doubts that closing the front door was gonna make it go away. We’re supposed to believe that when the Susquehanna overflows we should run but when it’s radiation all we need to do is close the windows? Local Press We’re all gathering in Middletown waiting for the Met Ed press conference…..and this alarm goes off. Now…reporters are human too……most of ‘em anyway…and some of ‘em just say the hell with it and start running. I lived here….so I didn’t have anywhere to run to. Most stayed. They’d rather die than get scooped. And no sooner had the alarm been turned off than the Met Ed guy comes to the podium…. Met Ed Conditions are stable. There is no need to panic. While it’s certainly the civil defense’s prerogative to take those steps….we don’t think it’s necessary. If the civil defense chooses to tell inhabitants of Middletown to keep their windows and doors shut…that’s their prerogative. We have our windows and doors open. We don’t see any reason for emergency procedures. The radiation releases from the plant are no greater than these from a dental x-ray. Male Resident Sure…..the next time I see the Lt. Governor at the dentist wearing a space suit…then we can talk.. National Press People just snapped at this guy now. He was like the some slick bad guy in a movie. You couldn’t get your hands around him. We asked him why he didn’t tell us about the latest radiation release…why we had to hear it from the NRC. He told us that the NRC had it wrong….that their numbers were wrong and his were right… Met Ed The release that was made yesterday was within the limits that were acceptable….now I’m trying to ease the level of panic and concern…I don’t know why….why we need to tell you each and everything that we do…" Local Press Well, we only live here and you may kill us all before you’re all finished you arrogant son of a bitch. National Press I had a friend who worked for the Philly Inquirer…and they asked him to come down here and he told them to go to hell….that he was in no hurry to die. His viewpoint was making the most sense to me. Woman Resident The governor came on TV and said the pregnant women and pre-school age children should get out. And my son was 12….and I said….well, that’s pre-school enough for me, so we packed what we could in a green garbage bag and left. I had no idea where I was gonna go…..but when I got to the highway I thought….I had no idea that men could get pregnant too….’cause they were leaving as fast as I was. Politician In trying to calm fears….we managed to inflame them instead. We figured 5000 women and children…..but 140,000 people fled at once. Hell, I would have gone too…but I was stuck with the governor….and as Republicans we’d have to be the last ones out. My wife was pregnant at the time and I told her….I don’t care where you go…..but don’t stay here. It was a scary moment. Male Resident I had a gun….and at that moment I started carrying it. I figured I was getting out of here and if anybody tried to stop me, they’d get a bullet in the ass. There were guys driving towards the bridge in pick-up trucks with chainsaws….saying they were getting through no matter what. It was not what you’d call an orderly evacuation. I lived next door to the church, and there was something going on there. I went inside and the priest was offering general absolution. I figured what the hell and grabbed what I could. It’s like I always say…..there are no atheists in foxholes…..or where radiation is loose. Control Room Engineer It was like a game of "can you top this". Every time we’d seem to get past a crisis somebody would say…."well, we’re not gonna die from that….HERE’S what we’re really gonna die from." You had all these experts and each of ‘em had their own opinion it seems on what the most crucial issue was. And now all anybody wanted to talk about was the bubble. Politician Jesus….the bubble. I can’t even watch my grand kids playing with bubbles anymore. It makes me queasy. NRC We’re on the phone with Met Ed….and they keep telling us that this thing is over. The cooling pumps are back on…..the crisis is over. And then one of our top engineers comes into the room and tells us that him and his people had been crunching the numbers….and they detected a large hydrogen bubble at the top of the containment building….right over the core. Well….this means the core is severely damaged. And he says if it combines with oxygen the place could explode like Hiroshima at any time. And it’s at this point that President Carter calls for a report… Politician The governor talked to President Carter….and the President said "just tell me what you need"….and the governor is pissed off and says…."how about sending us somebody that we can trust…..’cause everybody that’s here right now talks out of the side of their mouth and looks like they’re 12 years old." National Press So now Carter is involved and he sends up one of the top technical guys from the NRC to take charge of everything…..and one of the things this does is it puts the gag on Met Ed…whom nobody believes anyway. And this guy shows up and he’s oddly reassuring. I mean……all of these guys looked like low level mobsters…with oily hair and ill fitting suits. And here comes this lumpy looking guy that reminds you of a high school psych teacher. And he’s got this corduroy suit jacket on with the patches on the elbows…..and the press instantly likes him because they all look the same as he does. And the guy has the worse comb over you ever saw in your life….I mean he would not face the inevitable with his hair….and in retrospect you gotta believe a guy with a bad comb over is gonna be a stubborn son of a bitch. Local Press Somebody leaked the bubble theory to the press…..and at 11 O’clock we’re waiting for this press conference…..and we’re all wondering if this is gonna be our last night on earth. I mean…..it was that scary. So the guy immediately comes in….and he talks about the bubble…and he makes it sound like a helium balloon at the carnival or something. He’s claiming that it’s not as dangerous as people think it is….and everybody wants to believe him but….everybody is so tired and confused by now….that we didn’t realize ‘till later that it was the NRC that said the bubble was gonna cause the place to explode in the first place….and now here’s the top NRC guy onsite telling us that the information is flawed…..that if it did blow up it wouldn’t be for at least a few days. So he was saying that we weren’t gonna die tonight at least….and he said it in such a charming southern way that everybody exhaled and said…"well, at least we’ve got a few more days..". We are all psychotic from the PR whiplash we’d been getting….I swear. Meltdown….China Syndrome….bubbles….it all kinda ran together at some point. The bubble business had caused our editors to re-write the lead story 27 times in one day. It kept changing. And some guys turns to me and says…"you know, at this point….if the place does go up….I hope it comes down and lands on my head." Woman Resident One thing I remember when we were leaving was trying to see as much as I could. I’d look at the fields and the countryside….and I’d try to burn it into my memory like I was taking a picture, because you really thought that you’d never get to go back. Somebody asked me later….I’m as religious as the next person I guess….and they asked me…"did you pray?" And I had to think about it. But I don’t think I did. You’d think at a time like this you’d be wearing your knees out praying, but maybe deep down somewhere you figured this was wasn’t on God…..this one was all on us. Child Resident I’d say "Mommy….where are we going?" And she said we were just going for a ride. I said "why are you crying Mommy?"….and she just said she was crying because she loved me so much. My mother is kinda weird. National Press I went to Middletown…..and I swear all that was missing was the tumbleweeds. There was nobody left. I mean…..they had not called for an official evacuation….but these people weren’t stupid. They got the hell out. Nobody had to tell them to leave. And I was told I had to file a story….and the only guy I could find was a writer from the Washington Post so we ended up interviewing each other. We had to do it outside because even the bar was locked up. A thirsty journalist is a pissed off journalist…so I hope I came across somewhat rational in his article. Politician We finally felt like we had somebody onsite that we could trust. As soon as I shook hands with the guy I knew he wasn’t gonna try to bullshit us. And he told us everything that was going on….and he ordered Met Ed to shut the hell up. Met Ed Give the guy what he asks for….and that’s it….not a thing more. Let him dig through the shit on his own. NRC You got two sets of NRC engineers analyzing that data on this bubble. One is saying that the place is a powder keg….and the other is saying no, that’s he’s getting different information……and I know that these 2 guys have hated one another for years….so neither was really telling the other how they were getting their information. But the guy with the better news….he was actually onsite….the other guy was screaming from Bethesda….so we went with the guy that was here……which was probably a good thing with the President coming. Male Resident The governor made an announcement that the President was coming. Now, I’ve been a registered democrat all my life. I voted for Carter…..I could tell he was a good man. But right now I just figured that years of peanut farming had made him soft in the head. I mean, I couldn’t get far enough away from this place, and now this dumb son of a bitch was gonna radiate himself for a few votes. Made no sense to me at the time but I suppose Nuclear engineering is easier to understand than politics. National Press We all breathed a sigh of relief. I mean….it must be over if the president was coming….right? NRC Well…..shit. What now? I got one engineer on the phone telling me the place is gonna turn into a giant weenie roast…and another telling me that things are fine. And the President is saying…."I’m coming down there." What else could we do? We said…."yes sir….we’ll be waiting." Most of his advisors in Washington thought he’d lost his mind. And then he shows up at the airport in Harrisburg, and he’s got his WIFE with him! Guy next to me said…."shit, why not bring Amy and Rosalynn too." Local Press The president was coming. This was big. So I start working the phones to see what I can do…and a friend of mine who works for the Harrisburg airport tells me to come down to the hanger where they’ll all be waiting for him…..he just told me to lay low and behave myself. In other words….don’t tell them I was from the press. So I’m kinda standing in the back with some employees….waiting for the president to arrive. And the top NRC and Met Ed guys are all standing there…tying their ties. None of ‘em looked like they’ve slept for weeks. All of a sudden….through a side door….comes another NRC engineer. Seems he rushed all the way from Washington to beat the Presidents plane. Well….this is the guy who thinks the place is gonna blow up any minute because of the hydrogen bubble. And right away everybody starts screaming at this guy….asking him what the hell he was doing here and calling him a dumb son of a bitch for scaring the shit out of everybody. And he’s screaming back….waving papers filled with his calculations in front of their noses…..telling them it’s not his problem if they don’t know anything about basic chemistry…and asking them if they’ve signed their wills. And this is going back and forth….and at one point it looked like there was gonna be a brawl in the hanger….although by looking at them….with their glasses and pen guards….I doubt Nuclear Engineers are gonna do much damage to each other. All I can say is that at this point……I was yearning for the old days of coal. NRC Oh….it just doesn’t get any better than this. The President’s helicopter is in the air and he’s coming because I assured him it was safe and now my two top engineers are getting ready to do an Ali/Frazier. And just as one has the other by the throat….a secret service guy pops his head in and tells us that the helicopter is landing…and right behind him is the Governor….who we’re supposed to greet the president with. And the governor says to me…"how are things"…..and I’m going…."well, all in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia"…and I think he smiled but I’m not sure if that’s what you’d call it. Politician So Carter comes in and gets briefed on the bubble….and he hears both sides of the story. And being a navy nuclear guy he’s probably the only one in the room that understands what they’re telling him. And you got the feeling that he wished he’d been told about the place blowing up any minute before he decided to come, and his wife looked like she wanted to kill him…..but it was too late now. Politically there was no way he could turn back now. If the President scampered back to Washington like a rabbit….well….what kind of message would that send? Control Room Engineer So I get to escort the President through the control room…..and him and his wife have got on their little yellow booties….and it was a little disconcerting to see the leader of the free world in yellow booties. But he asks me if I’m a Democrat, and I tell him that I am, and he goes…"good man, I feel safer already." And in the control room nobody have removed the picture of a baby on the wall with the caption "sometimes I don’t know whether to cry my eyes out, scream, or wet my pants". And the president sees it and says…."that baby would feel right at home in Washington.." He asked all the right questions, and we didn’t lie to him. He knew what he was talking about. I really respected the guy for coming. It took a lot of guts I think. If I didn’t have to be here I’d be in Disney Land… NRC Now the tour was over…and we all have to turn in the dosimeters we were wearing. And the President reads his and it’s high…..really high. And I nearly had a heart attack. I just exposed the President to radiation. You know, I felt like John Wilkes Booth for a minute. But then I look at mine…which is NRC issued….and it’s reading zero. Well, turns out that Met Ed never got around to recharging all the company dosimeters…so what they’d do was note what it was reading the last time a guy handed it in, and then subtract the difference. And the company guy didn’t know what the big deal was….apparently this was normal for them. Well, all these high ranking government officials are going crazy on the bus….thinking they had all been exposed to radiation…..and the secret service guys looked like THEY were gonna have a meltdown. But I finally explained what was going on and everybody kinda calmed down. Nobody had been exposed. But I could tell the President at this point was basically fed up with the company and the NRC, and I was expecting to sent into exile…maybe to some gulag in Siberia. An inauspicious way to end the crisis…to say the least. Local Press And this bubble thing? Turns out it was never a threat after all. The guys who were saying the place was gonna explode were using the wrong formula the entire time. At this point the engineers were walking around with a collective bag over their heads. Everybody wanted to find one and kill him. Met Ed Shareholders were going crazy. We had to find some way to calm frazzled nerves…and 6 days after the acid….er….incident, the chairman sent out a letter to the stockholders assuring them that everything was safe….and that we were gonna right the ship as it were. Of course this meant cutting costs.….lots of them. So he outlines the broad strokes, but the small print adds up too….we gotta lease power from other places now that TMI is out of service….so there’s gotta be a rate hike in the Harrisburg area…..and pregnant employees who were evacuated would not be paid for their time away from work. It was just good business…..shitty PR but good business. And everybody hated us by now anyway so what the hell. We’d lost almost 4 dollars a share in a few days. Can’t pay folks for not working. Woman Resident We were at the Hershey Arena when we heard about the President coming. They had cots set up there….army cots so uncomfortable it make you wonder if soldiers ever got any sleep. And I was tired…..and I just wanted to go home. So did everybody. So first in twos and threes….and then in bunches…..everybody grabbed what little they had and came back home. We figured the air has gotta be as clean as the driven snow if Carter is coming…and then some guy says…."well, the governor is a republican…he’s probably just telling him things are OK…and then they’re gonna poison him and get Nixon back in there." You gotta understand the Pennsylvania grasp of the absurd. If you live near the Susquehanna….you’ve automatically got a few screws loose. We all do…and were all kinda proud of it. Child Resident Mom says we could go home…..and I asked her if that meant I had to go back to school and she said yes…..so I kinda wanted to stay in the gymnasium longer. It wasn’t so bad really…..and it smelled really good….like chocolate…but just because it smelled like chocolate didn’t mean they had any. All I could see was grown up food everywhere. But we were outside by the time I noticed that I didn’t have my doll. And I started to cry and somebody must have heard me ‘cause out comes a nice man carrying my doll, saying he’ll give it to me only if I promise to stop crying. I did…and got my doll back. Male Resident I could tell it was over ‘cause the bars opened up again….and I recognized the guys drinking in them…locals. Before they were filled with foreign journalists. Those guys couldn’t speak English but they sure as hell learned enough of it to order beers. How you can file a story when you’re laying on the floor is beyond me. And when the "I survived Three Mile Island" T-shirts started being sold on the street…well, that settled it for me. The whole thing was now officially a big joke. It was all like a carload of smelly guys driving home from seeing the Exorcist in the movies…..ignoring the smell and not admitting that they had all shit their pants. I was so pissed that I wanted to kill somebody, but I wasn’t sure who….so I just said fuck it and moved on…..and now I get to live the rest of my life wondering if I’m gonna get sick and die from cancer thanks to the greed and ignorance of a utility company…who by the way jacked up my bill the week I got home. Gee, sounds good to me. National Press The NRC had blown off all the warnings that this could happen…..and now the press finds out about this guy within the NRC that had been screaming about this..the same guy they were about to fire….and the NRC give the guy a "bonus" of $4000…which doesn’t really make him feel better because they give the two top engineering guys….the same guys that thought he was a pain in the ass and ignored his warnings….well these guys each got $10,000…..and he figures that they haven’t learned a damn thing from all of this…it was all gonna be politics as usual….and he quits…which ought to make all of us feel really safe. Bureaucracy and safety are like oxygen and hydrogen. Woman Resident You know….2 years after the accident my daughter had to have some growths removed from her ovaries. Not totally uncommon…..but 3 other girls on our street had the same problem. And we took this to the so called "experts", and they said that it was probably caused by "stress". Must be some kind of stress to cause growths on the ovaries of an 11 year old. There was actually a 100% increase in the overall cancer rate in the years following the accident, but we kept being told that it was "stress" and that there wasn’t any evidence that it was related to radiation. Local Press Citizens brought some doctor in to go through the data….and he finds buried underneath everything a chart showing radiation readings throughout the event. And for 2 hours the line goes off the top of the page entirely…..meaning the level released could have been much higher and more dangerous than folks were led to believe. And he brings this information to this federal judge who was in the pocket of the NRC….and you’d think that people would learn……but no…..….she looks at the numbers and thinks they’re so far out of whack…and she rejects them out of hand. And that’s that. Folks are on their own health wise… Control Room Engineer …It was kinda like us in the control room. We’d be seeing the instruments, and they were reading numbers that we’d never seen before….so we said…."that can’t be right" and just reject it. You think folks would learn….but they never do, especially when somebody might be slipping them a little juice on the side. Politician Used reactor fuel was supposed to be moved off site to a government storage facility somewhere in Nevada. That sure sounds nice….except there is no government storage facility in Nevada or anywhere else. So the used fuel sits on-site…sitting in water so contaminated that it glows in the dark. With 9/11 changing the way we feel about everything…..well……lets just say that there’s no need to paint a bulls-eye on Three Mile Island or any other Nuclear facility. It would be redundant. We wanted to feel safe….so we did. Looking back….it was a silly feeling really….like leaving loaded guns around the house. But we bought it….hook line and sinker we bought it. Maybe it was political survival….you know, the primal political urge to survive…to be re-elected…whatever…..but if that’s the case I’d sure hate to be on my deathbed with that on my conscience. People went crazy when these places were being built….they were as informed as we were. They were right and we were wrong. Not the first time. Sometimes I feel like wiping the dirt off…..but I don’t know where to start. Control Room Engineer It took a billion dollars to clean the place up….that’s "billion" with a "B". And of course it’s not really clean at all……you can’t get anywhere near parts of unit 2 for about 1000 years. But we never really knew how close we were to meltdown…..until 1984. We were able to get a camera rigged up….and lowered it into the core. And half the core was gone. Half. And with some quick calculations it was determined that we were about 30 minutes from the China Syndrome. I went home and hugged my wife and kids pretty hard that night. Male Resident You look across at the island now and you see the same thing mostly. Unit No 1 is back online…..has been for years. And the steam pours from the cooling towers….and nobody here has any idea what’s going on inside that place…..and most folks are glad of it. I mean….everybody likes to eat meat….but nobody volunteers to visit the slaughter house, you know? The place is once again like background music. And people remember briefly…anniversaries…..10 years…..20 years…..25 years…maybe a Chernobyl event will get the blood pumping again….but then we’ll say that there’s like cavemen in Chernobyl…what the hell are they doing with Nuclear power? We’ll get together and talk some about what happened those days back on 1979. And then it’ll be time to get dinner ready or something….and it’s over. It’s like getting together to play cards. Who can really remember the details? And the steam still rises in the sky, and I can’t help but think that if this world has taught us anything….anything at all….it’s that it’s gonna happen again. Balladeer (sings)
It's been 25 years now
It was fear that clings to you
invisible sky it falls asleep
I stay here because
It's been 25 years now
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