I’ve checked with my parents now in their 80s to see what they recall. They were around the same age I am now or slightly younger when the emergency happened.
We lived in a neighborhood built in farmland outside of Elizabethtown and southwest of TMI by about 6 miles… maybe less. I was seven years old and going to Rheems Elementary School.
she was hit by a very intense smell that she refers to as metallic or iodine
According to my mom, the school bus was late that morning. She walked three doors down to the bus stop to make sure my sister and I got on the bus okay. Once we did, she said when she was walking home and about half way there, she was hit by a very intense smell that she refers to as metallic or iodine. She said it was so thick in the air that you could taste it. News broke for her of what was going on a short time later.
Mom has always had a strong sense of smell. On top of that, we regularly smelled manure living out there in farmland. She’d grown up in Clairton, PA near the coke plant where they’d sweep ash off the porch in the morning or wash their walls once a year, or where you’d encounter quencher down in the “bottoms” (lower elevation area near the mill) in the air. Down there, the quencher would drop like droplets of yellow honey from the sky after the coke making process. Her grandparents had a house near there, and so she’d smelled industrial smells throughout her life. This was nothing like any of that. She’d smelled a lot of industrial smell over the years, but nothing like what she smelled that first morning that the TMI emergency had been announced.
My parents came to get my sister and I at school. I remember it was book fair and we complained that we didn’t want to leave school without getting books. They let us buy the books, and then took us home.
Mom was constantly worried that we’d been contaminated
While we were still in the neighborhood, mom remembers seeing military activity there. This was on a dead end of a street on a hill about 3.5 miles west of Bainbridge, just down the Susquehanna River from TMI. She said she knew they were military because they were in uniform and driving military vehicles.
Mom wrestled with leaving. Her family back in the Pittsburgh area was pressuring her to bring the family west, and two days later we hit the road. Mom was constantly worried that we’d been contaminated. Part way to Pittsburgh, Dad says he got off the turnpike at the first tunnel headed west bound and then headed toward Shippensburg. At some point my mom stopped and got on a pay phone to her parents in order to share her concerns. My grandmother and grandfather told her to stop being ridiculous and get us kids there immediately. We continued on our way, where we stayed for at least a week.
Nearly as soon as we got to Pittsburgh, my dad says he heard on the radio that President Carter was coming to Harrisburg. He figured if the President was coming then it was safe enough to be home, so he announced at dinner that he’d be heading back home so he could work. He may have been concerned about being around for his own family too, as his mom was elderly and lived with my great aunt also in Elizabethtown not far from TMI.
He came home, leaving the rest of us in western PA. The situation at TMI progressed, and about a week later he returned to bring us home.
George