I was managing editor at PA Newspaper Publishers’ Association (now PA News Media Assn.) on North Front Street, Harrisburg, at the time of the TMI incident in 1979. Our CEO, G. Richard Dew, called the entire staff (nearly all females) into his office at the point when people were evacuating the Greater Harrisburg area for the weekend, soon after the incident. He said he could only promise one week’s salary to all of us if we had to totally evacuate the area for some time.

“Whew, thanks.  We thought we were going to get zapped.”

At lunch that day, I drove across the river to a shopping center in Enola, where a traveling couple from New York state had stopped for a respite after hearing the radio news about a nuclear incident at a plant near Harrisburg. They flagged me down in the parking lot to ask how far away that nuclear plant was. My reply was “About 10 miles downstream.” The husband replied, “Whew, thanks.  We thought we were going to get zapped.”

Many of us did depart Harrisburg on that fateful Friday afternoon. Coming back on Sunday night to be ready for the work week was an eerie experience as I drove on Interstate 83, the beltway around the capital city. Hardly any lights were in the windows of apartment buildings and homes. It looked like an air raid blackout.

One article that I wrote for PNPA’s publication that was subsequently reprinted in the Central Pennsylvania Chapter newsletter of The Society of Professional Journalists/Sigma Delta Chi began with this lead paragraph:  “Local media provided commendable accounts of the Three Mile Island incident, while outside media tended toward overblown stories. This was the conclusion of state, county, and local government officials, as well as journalists, who met (in May 1979) to evaluate the media’s performance.”

Dickinson College in Carlisle (about 25 miles from Three Mile island) was flooded with telephone calls seeking accurate information and requests for students to come home, according to then communications executive Leonard G. Doran.  At the government officials and news media evaluation session, Dauphin County Commissioner Jack Minnich said he was disturbed by certain terminology, such as the word “meltdown” and the phrase “the worst nuclear disaster in the nation’s history.” Minnich added, “Just because there’s a movement, it doesn’t mean people are ‘fleeing.’ There’s an important difference.”

the TMI accident was just as frustrating to journalists as it has been to the public they serve

On April 4, 1979, The Sunbury Daily Item newspaper ran an editorial saying that the TMI accident was just as frustrating to journalists as it has been to the public they serve. And timing is everything.  Ironically, one of the newspaper’s staff writers had days earlier written a review about the movie, “The China Syndrome,” which appeared in the paper’s “Leisure Time” supplement on the same day as front page headlines about the TMI accident!

Interestingly, as I combed through old Sigma Delta Chi newsletters I’d saved, I came upon a letter, dated Oct. 23, 1974, inviting members of the local Society of Professional Journalists to tour the TMI plant, conducted by Metropolitan Edison’s PR man. One generating unit had recently begun operations. A second unit was under construction at that time, and it allowed a unique opportunity to central Pennsylvania journalists and PR specialists to see the inside of a nuclear power plant. Thus a bus-load of Central Pennsylvania journalists gained some knowledge of how such an energy-generating plant worked, several years in advance of the TMI accident. That bus ride for its members to the TMI plant balanced the Society’s previous month’s program, which featured Public Utility Commission Counsel Herb Denenberg who attacked nuclear power plants.

The TMI topic remained an important one for the public as well as for journalists. In February 1980, Sigma Delta Chi’s newsletter offered a place for journalists to turn to when they needed to quickly understand and interpret the issues involved in nuclear and other complex scientific topics. It was the Scientists’ Institute for Public Information, based in New York City. The organization could put reporters in touch with one of 2,000 scientists.

I hope that my information has given you a few more insights to what late March 1979 was like in the Harrisburg area.

Linda