At the time of the TMI crisis I was running Jethro’s Restaurant and Bar at 1st and Ruby in Lancaster. It was around 11PM. A light rain was falling. I am not sure what the date was. There were just three of us watching Dick Hoxworth on WGAL TV. I was with Richard Kneedler from F&M and Bill Saylor a broadcaster with WGAL. Bill kept repeating “They don’t know what is happening. They do not know. Nobody knows what the situation is.” Kneedler knew that the college was monitoring the radiation levels and decided to call and get a current report. The report was that the levels had gone up 11% very recently.
“They don’t know what is happening. They do not know. Nobody knows what the situation is.”
That was all I needed to hear and I started to box up the expensive liquor, the champagne, the crab meat, the steaks—whatever would fit in our Le Car. I called my wife. She called her sister in West Virginia and found out they were thinking of fleeing further south. Either way we had a place to stay in West Virginia. We could share our food and drink.
It will be chaos. The roads out will be jammed.
I called my parents who lived in Lancaster and tried to persuade them to evacuate with us. They were not willing to leave. If the situation required evacuation they thought there would be help available. I remembering saying, “Really, you think a bus is going stop by and pick you up? It will be chaos. The roads out will be jammed.” They would not be persuaded.
Within hours we were on our way south. I thought I was saying goodbye to home forever.
We later found out that radiation normally increases with precipitation. I think we were back in less than a week.
Ed