MG: The people inside the power plant on the morning of the accident were
suddenly confronted with this array of alarms. Ninety alarms went off in the
first few seconds. And the alarms were not intelligently grouped. In other
words, the alarm that said you had low pressure in the system was right next to
an alarm that said the elevator wasn't working, you know? So they had not
thought any of this stuff out in terms of its lay-out.
When these alarms go off like this, it's got to be fairly exciting, but there
is one alarm that really gets everybody's attention in the control room. And
that is the radiation alarm. And the first alarms begin coming in, "We have
radiation in the reactor building." Well, that was alarming because it means
something's happened. There's a leak down there somewhere and radiation is
getting out of the system. Next thing, they get an alarm "Radiation in the
auxiliary building," which is the pump house between the reactor and the
control room. And then they get the alarm "Radiation in the control room."
Well, that's got to be a heart stopper. At that point, you have to realize
this accident had attracted a certain amount of attention and everybody who
knew anything about that plant was in the control room. They had all been
called and had started arriving at six o'clock in the morning. By 6:15, the
control room must have had 50 or 60 people in it and more arriving every
moment. The minute that alarm went off, "Radiation in the control room," poof,
everybody's gone. The only people who stayed were the people who had to be
there, Gary Miller, Craig Faust, Ed Fredrick, the plant operators, and the top
engineering people, George Kunder, that crowd, the people who actually had
direct responsibility. The innocent bystanders took off for the high unknown
and who can blame them. But, from that point on, for the next several hours
everybody was talking through air hoses because they all had air breathing
masks on. When they would go to the telephones they were talking and trying to
tell 'em what's going on and that was another contributing factor. On the
other hand, you should not get the impression that there was panic. There was
never, among the operators, any panic in that control room. These guys were
Navy trained. They had experience with battle damage and they were not going
to leave the bridge of a sinking ship. If necessary, it was quite clear, they
were going down with the ship. And they stood their ground and they managed to
bring the plant under control, with a certain amount of heroism, I might say.
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