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When word of the trouble at Three Mile Island first filtered out of the plant, the institutions of crisis management lurched slowly into motion.
Kevin J. Molloy, Dauphin County civil defense director, was boiling water for coffee in his home at Hummelstown when the first call came from a dispatcher warning of a "site emergency" at the nuclear power plant. The time was 7:02 a.m. - more than three hours after the first sign of trouble.
That same minute Clarence Deller of the state's Emergency Management Agency logged in a call from a Metropolitan Edison shift supervisor also warning of an emergency at Three Mile Island.
Molloy and Deller began spreading the alarm through a network of local civil defense officials, mayors and state authorities. "My first reaction was: Do we have to evacuate?" Molloy recalled.
It was not until 10 a.m. that Dr. Harold Denton, the chief of reactor operations for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was called out of a meeting at the agency's Bethesda headquarters to be informed that a "relatively serious sort of event" had occurred at Three Mile Island.
Yet at 7:20 a.m. Met Ed official Dick Bensel told Molloy's dispatcher that a "general" emergency was under way. That meant bigger trouble than the initial alert but not necessarily enough to evacuate residents.
But by 7:30 a.m. a review of evacuation procedures was already being proposed by the state civil defense agency. "We told them not to begin an evacuation until they were instructed to do so by this office," said agency spokesman John Comey.
(In a February 4, 1974 letter Met Ed wrote Middletown borough officials that "even the worst possible accident postulated by the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] would not require evacuation of the borough of Middletown. . . it can he seen that it is unnecessary to have specific evacuation routes identified. . .")
At about 8 a.m. retired Army colonel Oren Henderson, one of the senior military officers in the Mylai operation in South Vietnam more than a decade earlier, was on the phone to Gov. Richard Thornburgh. Henderson, the top official in the state's civil defense apparatus, acknowledged afterward that he didn't know what to do or what to recommend at that point. "We lacked so much knowledge about what was going on," he said.
Shortly after 9 a.m. Wednesday, the calls came in to the Old Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., almost simultaneously and Jessica Tuchman Matthews fielded them in such rapid-fire order that now she can't remember which one came first.
One was from the situation room in the basement of the West Wing of the White House. The other was from NRC headquarters.
They were calling Matthews, who is the president's National Security Council staff expert on nuclear energy reactors, to report that one had gone bad up at Three Mile Island, Pa., which is a place she had never even thought about.
She remembers mostly that it was all very incomplete. A turbine had tripped; partial loss of coolant; question of possible offsite release of radiation.
Matthews hung up the phones and immediately wrote a short memo - a few paragraphs - to alert her boss, Zbigniew Brzezinski, about what was happening. The memo was taken from her third floor office across the driveway to the White House. Brzezinski immediately took it in to brief President Carter. It was about 10 a.m. Wednesday. "It looked like things were under control." Matthews recalled.
Evacuation was on the minds of state officials early in the day. But no one was prepared to recommend it.
Dauphin County had experienced emergencies before. In 1972 and 1975 the Susquehanna River had flooded. On both occasions Kevin Molloy's office was on alert.
But the severity of what was happening at Three Mile Island was slow to penetrate. For much of the citizens and officialdom of the surrounding communities the plant had been accepted as an economic boon. Word of earlier malfunctions at the plant had been carefully contained and the prevailing local view was that the benefits far outweighed the possible dangers.
Nonetheless, Robert Reid, the mayor of Middletown, just three miles from the plant, became an increasingly angry man from the moment he first got word of the trouble - while he was teaching a high school government class.
Reid tried but was unable to reach officials of Metropolitan Edison in Reading until 11 a.m. When he finally reached them there was no mention of radiation danger. Furthermore, Reid had little idea of how he would deal with the challenge of a largescale evacuation.
Shortly after he became mayor 18 months ago, Reid had decided the city needed a disaster evacuation plan. He assigned the task to Middletown civil defense director Donald (Butch) Ryan. On March 28, the date of the accident, the plan was still in drafting stages.
Had an evacuation order come from the state capital at Harrisburg, Middletown would have had to improvise.
(At a press conference Wednesday night in Harrisburg Lt. Gov. William W. Scranton III assured: "We do not expect there to be any kind of necessity for evacuation . . . ")
The adjoining town of Royalton - the closest community to the nuclear plant - was equally unprepared. Two days after the accident, its 74-year-old mayor, Charles B. Erisman, still had not been told by Met Ed that there was a problem on Three Mile Island.
"About 75 percent of our people are retired and half of them have no way out," Erisman said of the town's 1,040 residents.
Reid, nonetheless, expressed the prevailing attitude of charitable coexistence with the nuclear genie of Three Mile Island. "You know," he said, pointing out of his office toward the railroad tracks, "I've always been more worried about that than Three Mile Island." A train rumbled by, loaded with toxic chemicals.
At the King of Prussia, Pa., regional office of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a group of technicians gathered by 8 a.m. and established a crisis response center. Their view was detached, as was appropriate for professionals.
"We had an open line to the control room (at Three Mile Island) in about 30 minutes," said Thomas Elsasser, the NRC state liaison officer. "There was no tension or apprehension at that point.
"We knew that since they had got the radiation alarm there was something wrong there. But we knew the plant was shut down, and there had been no release of radioactivity."
At 8:45 a.m. six NRC inspectors piled into the office's emergency vehicle, a red station wagon with flashing roof lights, and began a highspeed run down the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Harrisburg, 86 miles away.
In Bethesda, chief of reactor operations Denton was confused by the fragmentary information trickling in from the field, particularly the reports of radioactivity. He was deeply worried by the possibility of reactor fuel damage. "We never had any incident of fuel overheating in a lightwater reactor plant before," he said afterward. Fuel damage raised the specter of a reactor "meltdown."
Two additional carloads of NRC officials soon left Bethesda and raced northward across the rolling Maryland and Pennsylvania countryside to link up with the team from the King of Prussia office.
When the NRC inspectors converged on the scene the capricious forces of technology had another surprise: Three Mile Island phones were jammed.
Two different telephone companies, Pennsylvania Bell and United Telephone, served the opposite shores of the Susquehanna River. Three Mile Island is served by both companies.
"There was just a terrible communications problem," Denton said. "All the phone lines were jammed up there. You got only bits and pieces."
As the day progressed, the surprises were increasingly ominous. Officials watched with growing concern the reports trickling into the NRC response center of high radiation levels in the plant's auxiliary building.
Denton, ironically, had packed his bags the previous day for a trip to Phoenix and then to sign off on the safety systems for a controversial new nuclear plant in California. It was a trip he never made.
Wednesday night Denton and his task force of NRC officials felt things were under control. The levels of radiation that were being monitored, they thought, corresponded to damage affecting about 1 percent of the fuel in the reactor - a relatively low level.
"We had a rough sequence of things that had gone wrong, we thought. We didn't know what the cause was. I thought it had been a small loss-of-coolant accident," Denton said.
Despite the feeling that things were substantially in hand, Denton decided to stay on that night at the crisis center.
At about 2 a.m., Thursday, he decided to grab one of the cots and a blanket that had been stored there. He lugged them down to an empty office where he caught a few hours' sleep.
The first word to the outside world came in the form of an "urgent" message - a signal of more than routine but hardly catastrophic import - over the Associated Press wire at 9:06 a.m. on Wednesday. It said: "Officials at the Three Mile Island Nuclear plant have declared a 'general emergency,' a state police spokesman said today."
There were no details, no explanation of what a "general emergency" was. AP quoted "spokesman" James Cox as saying that "whatever it is, is contained in the second nuclear unit."
That was enough, however, to fuse the explosion of news media attention that was by 1:30 to surround the plant with some 120 reporters, photographers and television technicians. The three networks as well as local television stations and newspapers from Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Baltimore were prowling the grounds, clustering about anyone who seemed to be in a position to speak authoritatively about what had happened.
Residents from nearby Middletown, Royalton, Londonderry and elsewhere, poured out to the scene - bewildered by events at the plant and bedazzled by the occupation army of news figures and government technicians. Mike Connor skipped school for the day. He decided he would set up a hot dog stand but his mother, Rita, said no. John Garnish boasted that he had been interviewed by five different local television stations, by ABC, by Newsweek and by the New York Daily News.
"Sixty Minutes will be here any minute," he predicted with the confidence of a newborn media star.
That night Walter Cronkite opened his nightly CBS television news program with these words:
"It was the first step in a nuclear nightmare, as far as we know at this hour, no worse than that. But a government official said that a breakdown in an atomic power plant in Pennsylvania today is probably the worst nuclear accident to date . . ."
Three Mile Island at that point became indelibly engraved as a historic place name in the nuclear era.