I was very affected by the accident and became involved in the anti-nuke movie. I am a poet and have been writing for a long time. This was written in 1979.
Dear Sir or Madman
(March 29,1979)
I wrote a letter to the NRC after the accident at Three Mile Island addressed to “Dear Sir or Madman.” It was an error but I left it. I also I wrote a poem titled “Imaginary Sirens” about how I’d wake in the night sweating, unable to get my breath, thinking I’d heard the sirens they said would sound if there were another large release or if the still fragile reactor was about to melt down. I imagined cars and billboards melting like Dali’s watches in a field.
Me writing some poems while sitting on my sisters porch when we visited her a week or so after the accident.
I wrote the letter after I had returned from my evacuation time in Philadelphia, after they told us to close all the windows and that breathing the air was like seven chest x-rays a minute. I watched us hold our breaths if we had to run to the car or into a building.
And this was after I took the back roads to Philadelphia to avoid the evacuation traffic and Ronald Reagan (not yet president) came on the radio for General Electric and told us how safe nuclear energy is. When I wrote that letter and poem it was months after I told my friend who had not evacuated to send all of my journals to Massachusetts. When I returned I was told by the scientist on the other end of the phone, to imagine I was burning leaves in my yard. He tried to explain how the wind blew the radiation the day before they announced the leak, the day we should’ve held our breath but didn’t know that the mild spring day that would hurt us.
This was when I asked him to stop using the home spun analogies, just to give me the science, and stop calling me Ma’am or I’d have to address him as Madman.
Barbara Buckman Strasko