I was a young widow with two small children, living in a Valley Green neighborhood about four miles from TMI. On March 20, 1979, I remarried and was looking forward to forming a new family with my children and my new husband. Ten days later, there was an emergency at TMI.
My husband had gone to work; the children were at school. Our neighborhood was quiet – when a strange thing happened. A police car drove slowly through the neighborhood directing us through a loudspeaker to “stay indoors, close all doors and windows, draw your curtains.” What!
I called some neighbors and we discussed the news we were beginning to hear on the radio about an accident at Three Mile Island. It seemed to me that the newscasts were not very detailed and were exceptionally low-key. I wondered how much protection a building could provide from radiation. I tried to imagine how an evacuation plan could work with clogged highways and people running out of gas. How close were we to a meltdown at TMI?
Sometime during the day, we were informed that our children, who attended school at Fishing Creek Elementary, had been bused to Dillsburg, where we could pick them up. My husband and I reasoned that the school district didn’t want to be responsible for busing the children to their homes inside the area of radiation. That’s when we decided to leave our neighborhood and stay with relatives in Philadelphia.
We stayed away two days. The news had become more explicit and we learned that a meltdown had been averted but that, if it had occurred, Philadelphia would not have been far enough away to be safe from a devastating disaster. We returned to find that our entire neighborhood had evacuated and most of them had not yet returned. The houses were dark and quiet.
. . .
On the day of the partial meltdown when the police drove down our street with its loudspeaker blaring surreal words from a disaster movie, I wrote the following poem (with no caps, the style at the time):
tmi
march 30, 1979,
Toni and Bob Albert
a day in early spring,
unseasonably warm
in Harrisburg.
but we mustn’t
breathe deeply of
the sweet warm air;
it is laden with
a new pollen,
invisible, insidious.
we mustn’t walk in
the spring-warm sunshine;
today its rays are magnified –
no longer a
benevolent god,
it has become
a different symbol,
an unseen heat,
penetrating our homes
and our bones,
burning and eating
our flesh while
we feel nothing.
today is not
a good day to
show my daughter
the spring flowers. no.
today we must
seal ourselves inside
our paper houses
and try not to think|
about the world
we have poisoned.
try not to realize
that a multitude of people
cannot be evacuated.
try not to picture
the scarlet radiation
seeping and squirming
from its dungeon into
the soft spring air,
the blood-red particles
settling on the bright
yellow petals of
daffodils.
but in the mind’s
pandorian darkness,
the image persists,
the image of red paint,
hot and sticky and
smelling of carrion,
coating every cell.
and I am so afraid.
. . .
Toni