Immediate Response

(3)

Emergency

At 6:56 a.m., nearly three hours after the initial incident, the TMI supervisor declares a site emergency, which is soon followed by an official “general emergency.”  There is confusion even among law enforcement in nearby Harrisburg of what that even means.  Reports coming out of the TMI plant are unintelligible and infrequent, and what little information that comes out is patently soothing.  Met-Ed eventually contacts the civil defense state and local agencies.  By 8:40 a.m., a van of N.R.C. officials (none of whom have enough familiarity to operate the TMI-2 reactor) leaves Philadelphia. (1)

Met-Ed’s representatives and the officials kept reiterating how little there was to worry about and how there was “a cause for concern but not alarm.” (2)  Soon, an advisory evacuation was recommended for children and pregnant women.

By this time, scattered reports of emergency had reached the media.  Scores of reporters have flocked onto the island even as some nervous residents headed out of town.

(1) Daniel F. Ford, Three Mile Island: Thirty Minutes to Meltdown (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 35-36.

(2) J. Samuel Walker, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Prespective (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 89.

(3) Mike Gray and Ira Rosen, The Warning: Accident at Three Mile Island (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 248.