Three Mile Island’s cooling towers stood like ivory rooks, silhouetted against the drab gray of February on a recent afternoon in Dauphin County.
The towers were airbrushed on the doors of Londonderry Township’s firetrucks, a hopeful image, with all four billowing plumes into the sky above the Susquehanna River. The towers haven’t looked that way since March 28, 1979, though, when one of the nuclear plant’s reactors suffered a partial meltdown, and families scrambled into their cars and fled or hid inside with their drapes closed.
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“My children don’t glow in the dark,” he joked.
Allen Myers, 63, recently retired from Three Mile Island, recalls his family moving out to a nearby farm to be safer. He wasn’t scared, though.
“The general public and the media blew it up bigger than it was,” he said.
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Three Mile Island Unit 1, the surviving reactor that employs about 675 people, is set to close in September because it is losing money in a low-priced electricity market. Legislators recently introduced a $500 million plan to rescue the state’s nine reactors. TMI Unit 1 is in the most precarious financial condition.
In Kuppy’s Diner, a narrow throwback in Middletown open since 1933, the owner waved off a reporter’s questions about the “legacy” of Three Mile Island. Employees of the plant sat at the counter, eating lunch. On another weekday morning, Christine Layman, an administrator of the Three Mile Island Survivors Facebook group, sat in a booth there, speaking in hushed tones.
She was living in Strinestown, York County, at the time of the incident, about 6.7 miles southwest of Three Mile Island as the crow flies. At the time, she had a daughter in preschool. A firefighter told her to throw a blanket over her daughter’s head and “get as far away as she could.” She wound up in Hanover, 26 miles south, and fears it wasn’t far enough.
“It was like something out of a horror movie,” she said. “No one knew what was going on. People outside of the area knew more about what was happening than we did.”
The Facebook group has 3,700 members, many with a variety of cancers or neurological issues. “Just about everyone has thyroid issues,” Layman said.
“That’s why I started this group,” she said. “I want to change the history books. We were harmed. We are the proof we were harmed.”
Layman says she can’t drink out of a metal can without being reminded of the metallic taste in the air that day. She said she has thyroid issues but can’t handle the medication. Layman’s other maladies included brain lesions, memory problems and fertility issues.
She says the Facebook group has its critics, people who would like the group to be quiet in light of what’s happening with the possible closure of Three Mile Island.
“Why would they bite the hand that feeds them?” she asked.
Several Middletown Council members declined to comment, and others could not be reached. Council member Jenny Miller said the closure of TMI is out of local hands. She fears the shuttering would hurt local restaurants and gas stations.
“Whether the plant remains open, or not, we just want to ensure that it is cleaned up properly,” she said. “It takes years to have it cleaned.”
In Londonderry, Three Mile Island pays more than $900,000 in taxes each year to the township. It’s also the township’s biggest employer and a longtime benefactor to local youth groups and nonprofits. Old black-and-white photos of the plant hang on the walls in conference rooms in the fire department, along with banners for the annual golf outing TMI hosts to raise money for the fire department.
“That golf outing actually pays for all of this,” said fire Chief Bart Shellenhamer, a township supervisor.
In the days after the partial meltdown, Shellenhamer said, the fire department helped alert residents, urging them to evacuate. He estimates TMI has raised more than $600,000 for the fire department in the decades that followed.
“The municipality will lose money. The fire department will lose money. The school district will lose money,” he said. “It’s a big loss.”
By comparison, the fire department’s Lenten fish fries would raise up to $30,000 over seven Fridays. (The fish, Shellenhamer noted, are not caught locally.)
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