March 28th marks the 32nd anniversary of the Three Mile Island accident.
On 28th March 1979 the No. 2 reactor at the
Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station
south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, underwent a partial meltdown.
As the Washington Post reported in a
recent story the crises
"didn’t fully end until the last of the filtered water from the flooded
containment building finally evaporated in 1993."
A series of mechanical failures and human factors lead to the accident
which makes for interesting reading.
In the immediate aftermath of the event, the Washington Post published this
multiple-part account which appears in their archives -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...athappened.htm
Wikipedia also have an entry here -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
As reported in a
recent story in the New York Times, at the time of the accident,
the then Governor of Pennsylvania, Richard L. Thornburgh, asked an aide to
make sure the evacuation plans for the surrounding counties would work.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by New York Times story by Gardiner Harris, March 21 2011
The aide came back ashen faced. Dauphin County, on the eastern shore of the river, planned to send its populace west to safety over the Harvey Taylor Bridge.
“All well and good,” Mr. Thornburgh said in a recent speech, “except for the fact that Cumberland County on the west shore of the river had adopted an evacuation plan that would funnel all exiting traffic eastbound over — you guessed it — the same Harvey Taylor Bridge.”
Nearly 250,000 people would have been sent in opposite directions over the same narrow bridge.
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That New York Times article here -
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/he...er=rss&emc=rss