At 3:53 a.m., March 28, 1979, the cascading failures of valves, pumps, gauges and reactor operators combined to produce the worst accident in the U.S. commercial nuclear power industry. The accident occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, a few miles downstream from Harrisburg. For 48 hours, the reactor was dangerously out of control.
Anyone living in and around T.M.I. remembers exactly where they were on March 30 when they heard Gov. Dick Thornburgh order all preschool children and pregnant women within five miles of the plant to evacuate and later everyone within 10 miles to close their windows and stay indoors. Seven thousand people were evacuated and perhaps a hundred thousand more fled.
A hydrogen bubble formed in the reactor bringing it very close to exploding. Within a few days, scientists reduced the size of the bubble. The cooling down process, however, took a month and the radioactive plant would take years to decontaminate.
Though no lives were lost in the accident, the uncertainty and fear it caused gave people a new sense of vulnerability. The day after the accident, 35,000 protesters in Hanover, West Germany, chanted, "We all live in Pennsylvania."
UPDATE asked two of the people who received the first phone calls about the accident to recount their most vivid memories of those first few hours of March 28, 1979.
