Q: Do you remember how you first heard about the incident and where your
initial reaction was?
RT: Well, March 28th, 1979, I was a brand-new governor and I had a full agenda
of items that had to be dealt with. Our economy was in a tail spin.
Pennsylvania was a classic rust belt state and our smoke stack industries were
really in a state of decline. Unemployment was creeping up. We had a tax base
that was inadequate. We had a record debt. I mean these were things governors
roll up their sleeves and tackle, and that's precisely what I was doing on the
morning of March 28th, 1979. I'd just delivered my first budget address, which
kind of set the outline for where we wanted to go, and I had brought a group of
freshman Democratic legislators to the governor's home for breakfast to do some
sales pitching. I was a Republican, am a Republican, and I felt some
missionary work among opposition might be fruitful in getting this task
advanced. We had this group assembled in the dining room, ready to feed them
and to inform them, we hoped, when, at 7:50 -- and I'll never forget that time
-- I received a phone call from our director of emergency management and he
told me that there had been an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear
facility. For just a moment, I tried to think where that was and then
recognized or recalled from a briefing I'd had that it was about ten miles down
the Susquehanah River from the capitol. While I didn't know any of the
particulars, I knew immediately that any kind of an accident at a facility
like that was something that really was gonna be a serious consideration for
us. I notified other people in our government, on my staff, and people with
the responsibility for emergency management, and just kind of went back to the
breakfast with this on my mind. I remember I was walking down the hall and my
wife was coming the other direction. I just stopped for a minute and told her
that I'd gotten this call about an accident at the nuclear facility at Three
Mile Island. We kind of looked at each other in a puzzled way. And that kind
of set the stage. I think we were puzzled for a long time thereafter.
Obviously, that was simply, if you will, a news bulletin. I had no detail on
what had happened. I went back to the breakfast and made no mention to the
assembled legislators because I knew we'd have to have more facts before we
began to talk about it in public.
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