Q: Any feelings pro or con about evacuation plans?
MP: If they would have had to order an evacuation, there would have been
pandemonium. I mean, think about it for a second. If you're going to evacuate
five miles out, you're talking about a circle five miles from the plant, or ten
miles out, which was one of the discussions. But that has ramifications, you
know, further than, I mean, it's not only the ten miles, then you have
ramifications at 15 miles, and 20 miles and hundred miles out.
The idea of evacuating an area that size is just astoundingly incredible and
all I could think of was just massive traffic jams with people trying to get
out and piling on top of each other trying to get away. My wife worked in
radio at that time, and her mother lived slightly south of York, PA, right
near the Interstate 83 Expressway, and I remember saying to her that I would
feel better, I would be able to do my job better if I knew that she was safe,
so I asked her to please stay with her mother, right near the Expressway. And
I said, "If you even hear of an evacuation, a hint of it, get on that
Expressway and head south as fast as you can, try to beat the rush." But it
would have been an astoundingly difficult process, to evacuate an area about,
like that. I mean, these days if they have a toxic waste spill, they evacuate
a couple of blocks. Well, that's a major undertaking, when you think about it.
So it was a very incredible process and I don't think there were any plans in
place really to do something like that. And they knew that. They didn't want
to have to order an evacuation. That would have been the last thing that they
would have wanted to do.
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