I lived in West Mt. Airy (Philadelphia) during the TMI event.
Shortly after the near meltdown, an old friend set me up with a blind date. The man was a disaster planner in Washington, DC, and he showed up at my door, not with a bottle of wine, but with a dosimeter. The awareness that everyone in my circle knew what the little gizmo was called and what it did was somewhat tempered because we were such hippies (still) that we were closely monitoring the colors of spiderworts in the neighborhood, convinced that we needed no more than the flowers as our early warning system.
we were closely monitoring the colors of spiderworts in the neighborhood
Moving to Harrisburg at the beginning of the dismantling of the damaged cooling tower snapped me out of my dreamy reverie about defining a safe distance from disaster and folklore protections. TMI Alert came into focus as I opened the Patriot News each morning to see how much worse things really were. That was the end of my joking and innocence about lavender and blue wildflowers.
Susan