MIDDLETOWN — On the morning of March 28, 1979, newly minted Gov. Dick Thornburgh was sitting down to breakfast with a selection of representatives from the state House around 7:40 a.m..
He was trying to sell them on his budget — the first of his administration — when the phone rang.
It was the state's emergency management director, letting him know there had been an “accident” down the road at Three Mile Island in Dauphin County.
Almost four hours earlier, a valve in one of the plant's reactors had stuck open, allowing coolant to escape. Operators had misdiagnosed the problem, which was compounded when they disabled an automatic backup system.
Initially, none of that was known. The state only knew that an accident had occurred.
“Everything,” Thornburgh said, “Went out the window.”
Former state Gov. Dick Thornburgh shakes hands with Robert Reid, former mayor of Middletown, during a conference on the Three Mile Island accident on Thursday at Penn State Harrisburg in Middletown. Mark Pynes | mpynes@pennlive.com
During the next five days Thornburgh would be challenged with steering the state through the nation's first — and worst — commercial nuclear disaster, an event for which no playbook existed. It would also become one of the defining moments of his eight years as governor.
Thornburgh, now in his 80s, recalled the events of that spring Thursday at the start of a two-day conference at Penn State Harrisburg, on the eve of the 35th anniversary of the crisis.
It was, said Penn State Harrisburg Chancellor Mukund Kalkarni, an event that “reverberated across the state, nation and the world,” which would change how society addressed disasters and emergency preparedness to this day.
- Read more stories about the 35th anniversary of Three Mile Island here.
And yet, on the morning of March 28, 1979, Thornburgh only knew there was a problem at the plant. Beyond that, there were few details. In the movie theaters around the midstate, the film “China Syndrome” was playing, in which a fictional nuclear power plant comes dangerously close to a meltdown, which would have the potential to contaminate an area “the size of Pennsylvania.”
Whether or not to evacuate would become a pivotal question for events surrounding TMI, and one that was never far from the governor's mind.
Looking back, he said, we know today that a disastrous meltdown, a la the “China Syndrome,” was not in the cards, nor was there a widespread radiation leak, or the possibility of a nuclear explosion.
But, he said, “when I answered that phone, I knew none of this.”
“I knew enough that the thought of a general evacuation entered my thoughts at 7:50 and never left me,” Thornburgh recalled.
With no existing state agency to handle a nuclear catastrophe, Thornburgh instead settled for an ad hoc committee of trusted advisers. One of their first actions was, as much as possible, to continue business as usual while monitoring the situation, to maintain a sense of normalcy and prevent panic.
Meanwhile, his office was receiving contradictory reports from regulators and the plant's operator, Met Ed, which Thornburgh said “seemed to speak with many voices, then none at all.”
“So it fell to us to tell the people … that this situation was more complex than the company had led us to believe.”
The day, Thornburgh recalled, was “an interlude, a day for the drawing of deep breaths.” There was little news from the reactor, where utility crews said the worst was behind them, and the reactor was stable.
Former Gov. Dick Thornburgh recounts the Three Mile Island Nuclear Crisis on Thursday afternoon at a conference at Penn State Harrisburg in Middletown. Mark Pynes | mpynes@pennlive.com
On Friday, it was discovered steam pressure was building in the reactor. Thornburgh said the operators vented the pent-up steam, as a helicopter was taking radiation readings over the plant, but not in the surrounding area where radiation levels remained below a significant level. When the elevated readings reached Washington, D.C., federal officials recommended the area be evacuated, not understanding that the readings had been taken from directly above the plant.
Instead of communicating directly with his office, federal officials notified the state's emergency management director, who notified civil defense to put them on standby. A civil defense worker then notified a local radio station that an evacuation could be imminent.
“I certainly did not intend to evacuate thousands on unconfirmed information,” Thornburgh said, who believed an evacuation could be more deadly than the plant.
“If ever we were close to a general panic, this was it,” he said.
Even though an evacuation was not deemed necessary, Thornburgh would compromise with the concerned public, calling for a voluntary evacuation of pregnant women and preschool-aged children within a five-mile radius.
To clear lines of communication, President Jimmy Carter sent Harold Denton, then head of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, as his liaison on scene.
Denton's arrival, Thornburgh said, was “a turning point in the crisis.” His ability to speak to the people, calmly, in a way they understood, aided the government immeasurably in calming the situation. Denton is scheduled to speak at 9 a.m. Friday at Penn State Harrisburg, at part of the two-day summit.
Thornburgh's administration was beginning to believe things were winding down. That is until a news service ran a bulletin about a hydrogen bubble within the reactor, warning of a possibly imminent explosion, a report Thornburgh called “absolutely, totally groundless.”
Still, it once again caused the crisis to begin to escalate.
Looking back 35 years, Thornburgh said a person “cannot appreciate what the effect of a panic is until you have been in one of these situations.”
As his administration tamped down rumors, he reached out to President Carter, asking for his help. Carter arrived the next day and toured the plant with Thornburgh.
That event, he said, did much to allay the public's fears, by convincing people that “if it was safe enough … for the governor and president of the United States, then it was safe enough for anyone.”
Although the crisis would end a few days later, it would continue to haunt Thornburgh for the remainder of his time in office. Over the next seven years, his administration would be “preoccupied” with questions and investigations, cleanup and reactor restarts.
And yet the events of that spring also would change the way the government approaches, plans and addresses disasters. Before TMI, there was no state Emergency Operations Center, no unified 911 system, no Federal Emergency Management Agency.
TMI forever changed the landscape of not only the midstate, but also Pennsylvania and the nation.