ML19308C482
| ML19308C482 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Site: | Crane  |
| Issue date: | 07/11/1979 |
| From: | NRC - NRC THREE MILE ISLAND TASK FORCE |
| To: | |
| Shared Package | |
| ML19308C477 | List: |
| References | |
| TASK-TF, TASK-TMR NUDOCS 8001240639 | |
| Download: ML19308C482 (90) | |
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1 ATTEtiDEE LIST JULY 11, 1979 NAME AFFILIATION Cyril J. Laffey Dept. Comm., Pennsylvania State Police l
George Evans Major, Pennsylvania State Police i
Robert M. Carroll Departmnt of Military Affairs l
Clarence Deller PEMA Thomas Gerusky DER, Bureau of Radiation Protection Eranett E. Welch Health Robert C. Furrer Agriculture Craig A. Williamson PEMA l
Thomas C. Elsasser f4RC Region 1, State Liaison Officer Frederic Herr NRC/TMI 3pecial Inquiry Malcolm L. Ernst flRC/TMI Special Inquiry Joe E. Logsdon EPA. DPR, Washington, D. C.
Lt. Joseph A. Robyak State Police Lt. Frank H. Lewski State Police Sim Suter Dept. of Transportation Julia Witmir Department of Health Alexander B. Rokow Departmnt of Health Kevin J. Molloy Dauphin County Thomas E. Blossor Cumberland County Joseph L. Dougherty Central Area, PEb%
C. A. Crowe PEMA Jim Cassidy PEF %
Hope Emurich PEMA Bill Karl PEMA Darwin Moyer AG R. E. Boyer Lebanon County EMA Joseph Watchilla DHA
- 0. Henderson PEMA This is a partial Attendee List 8 0 01240 Qp 9
Henderson I do want to introduce some of the folks we have here. We have three counties represented today: Kevin Malloy from Dauphin County, Tem Blosser from Cumber-land County, and Bob So3er from Lebanon County. We have, in addition to my own office representatives, my Deputy Fred Williamson and Operations Officer Dick Ramsey. Clarence Deller, Radiation Executive from the Department of Military Aff airs, Bob Carroll, Tom Gerusky from DPR, Welch from Deputy Secretary of Department of Health, Nu Furrer from Agriculture, Colonel Ev ans, State Police. We have Harold Gaut from NRC; EPA's Joe Logsdon, Mal Ernst, ilRC; Fred Herr.
Gaut We have one more gentlemen that will be in, Tom Elsasser, as soon as he finishes another meeting. He is the Regional Officer.
I would, generally speaking, what this is, is a discussion about seven areas which I would like, if we could keep to the topic. From your point of view as to what happened in more or less of the time sequence, I realize without logs you might have you cannot speak to tight spEifics.
If you have logs and they have pertinent data in them, that is fine, you can reference these. This is an informal discussion to get a picture of how it went and to share experiences of what went on during the early activities, especially, of the response to the Three Mile Island accident from your agencies' perspective.
Generally speaking, from the time that it happened, I would have us speak to those seven areas, the area which encompasses notification, both initial and and followup and associated with that, warning and cormiunications.
I think that under the circumstances, let's treat that as sort of a package. We found that it l
L
. sort of overlaps so much that it is hard to keep in one portion of it. So let us discuss the three areas as one; notification, warnings, and communication.
Another area would be accident assessment. Another area would be exposure con-tr ol.
I would like to, in deference to Tom (Gerusky), who I understand you have to be in a meeting this afternoon so you may not stick out the whole session, put those ahead of the next ene which would be command and control, public informa-tion, evacuation / traffic control, and food and agricultural problems.
Problems in the sense of what was perceived and what was done. Parallel with the comments on what happened, assuming w keep the same frarework of interest, I would also like your standard opinions on how you wish it had been.
I don't mean how the accident would have been, but' how, if you had your druthers, the thing would have worked in contrast to what actually happened during the play of events. So if you would be clear when you make your comments as to the difference between what happened and what you think should have happened, it would be helpful. We are recording everything, courtesy of Col. Henderson. We appreciate it very much, and we will take it back and transcribe it and we will send it right back co you for your persual before anything is done with them, just to make sure that tht. transcript %n is done correctly, we didn't leave So w'.th 5,nat, do you have any questions about what we are asking for?
Bill Loesdon, EPA One additional thing w could speak to is what lessons w learned, whether, in your activities, you found you had things that you didn't know you had, things that you wish you had, or procedures that you should have had. Things of this type so we could make use of them in helping plan the future, i
, Gaut I think that sort of ties in with the factor of how you wish it would have been.
We learned a lesson and how it would have been if we had known it in the first pl ace. Also, if ve can identify ourselves when we are speaking for purposes of the tapes. Bill Logsdon of EPA is the one who made the last comment.
If, at least the first time around, we identify ourselves, the girls will get to recognize our voices, I am sure, and we will go from there.
Gerusky I still am not aware of the reason for the meeting, who called it, why, and what purpose is it going to serve?
Gaut It is part of the overall package, Tom, f hat NRC is putting together trying to find out exactly what happened in all f acets of the accident. We did a similar thing a year ago in January when Fort St. Vrain had their problems out there.
Their's turned out to be a non-problem questlan, and it was over in 48 hours5.555556e-4 days <br />0.0133 hours <br />7.936508e-5 weeks <br />1.8264e-5 months <br />.
We got together with the utility which the NRC is working on heavily right now.
We have the two g st amen over here who are working on the Commission Task Force for what happened.
We want to marry in the package of what happened with the State now that thi.
ave cooled off; and as you say, we are almost all tired of talking about it.
In retrospect, what happened and how can we come up with a totally integrated package of the utility, what the Federal government did, of what the State governcent oid, and essentially it all contributes to this lessons l
l learned package that we are putting together. And a portion of that, the thing we would like to do is document what has occurred and how we could have changed it had we had a good
, Gerusky We have already met with the NRC inspectors on the accident itself and on the sequence of events, for a couple of hours with them, and told them what we know. We told them what we were involved in, and now we are going through the whole thing again.
Gaut Were all the parties here at that session?
(Numerous replies:
no)
This is the reason for this meeting, is to tie it all in. Now maybe, I am sure there will be repitition for several of the commissions here, most especially yourself.
I think this will,give us a chance I
0l understand these gentlemen assembled were the princip}e's to the event, the ones that should have been involved and what, in their opinions, went on.
I think ve are trying to gather state people together and get the state picture of what happened in an integrated sense.
Henderson Kevin (Molloy), Tom (Blosser), and Bob (Boyer), would you please sit up here where you will be closer to the mike. Kevin probably got the first call from the Island on the morning of the 28th of March, and then following second would be Clarence Deller, and I think maybe Kevin might kick off with the time sequence of his receiving the initial warning through comunicacion systems news.
K. Molloy, Dauchin Cot.nty l
I don't have my notes with me because I wasn't sure what was going on.
I don't I
think we actually got the first call.
Henderso'1 l
You didn't think you get the first call?
. Molloy tio, I think it wnt to Clarence (Celler). Then he made his notification. We also got a call from the Island which was shortly after 7.
The exact time I don't quite remember. ktually, we received three notifications as f ar as Sob and was concerned. My office got a call from Clarence. They also received a call from the Island itself.
I received a call at home from Maggie Reilly from the group on radiological protection.
In addition, my communi-cations center called me at home. This all took place I would say before 7:10.
I don't know the exact times.
I imediately headed into work. On my way into work our base communications center received another call around 7:20, I think, or in that general area. They were going to a general alarm. At that time I was in my car.
I was notified immediately by two-way radio. When I got into my office, I was notified and called over to PEMA just to verify what little information we had at that time. There wasn't that much information availaole anyway. Then I started calling my local directors and municipalities in a five mile zone, and so forth. That is basically how the initial sequence of events went. They went as planned in tems of notification procedures.
Henderson Let's back up then to Claren::e. Apparently at 7:02 you got the first call, Clarence, and to the best cf your knowledge what was that transmission from TMI you got Clarence Deller, PEMA At 7:02 a.m., I was notified by the shift supervisor at Three Mile Island of the emergency in Reacter 2.
It had been shut down and high levels of radiation within the reactor room. Please notify the Bureau of Radiation Protection and have them call back. At 7:04, I tried back to the Bureau of Radiation Protection duty officer.
l
V
, Henderson That was Bill Dornsife, right?
Deller Bill Dornsife. Right. At 7:08 after previously trying to call York, I notified Dauphin County and he said that ha had already received the word from the Island.
Subsequently, I found out from Bill Dornsife at that particular day that two per-sons from Three Mile Island were calling simultaneously. At 7:12, I notified Lancaster County Emergency Management nd told them that on my first try I was unable to contact York and requested they oass the word.
I fcund out that Ycrk County acknowledged receipt of the message via Lancaster at 7:20 a.m.
Subse-quent to that, I realized that the switchboard cperator should be in here shortly and sometime in the immediate future disconnect the duty officer from the diverter at home.
So I called this agency maybe once or twice.
I think it was
^
around 7:25-7:30, Jenny was on the switchboard and got Mr. Lamis on our opera-v tions officer to please come in here. At that time I was relieved of the sequence of notification. What occurred at 7:36, PEMA was notified by Three Mile Island that an emergency was in gear.
Henderson Let me back up here. During r.on-duty hours, we maintain a watch officer where one of our staff is predesignated as watch officer and we have three area head-quarter switchboards which transfer the call into this switchboard. This switch-board in turn has a diverter on it which we dial up in advance to get the duty officer's home telephone number so that the calls that come in on our emergency number are converted directly to the watch officer but they come from one of our counties that are and goes through the area, they are 1
. in turn diverted in here and then diverted to the watch officer. Clarence Deller was our watch officer that evening, and I think the call was probably where Jenny got the word to the operations officer, and you got it to the operations officer about 7:24-7:25 because at 7:25 I looked at my watch when Dick Lamison walked into m/ office and told me of the first incident at 7:25. And then 7:35 Dick notif ied me again.
Dick, did you get the next notification?
Dick Lamison, PEMA I received a call at 7;35 from the shif t supervisor who informed me that they had a small offsite release and the reactor had f ailed to cool.
I irmiediately notified DPR -- Maggie Reilly -- it was approximately 7:40, I guess, as to what the problem was. About 7:45, she returned my call, telling me that there was probably a small release in the neighborhood of about 10 MR and that we should be prepared to get our apparatus in order for an evacuation of the city of Goldsboro and Brunner Island.
In turn, we notified York County first as to what was the problem, what was the situation, asking them to call their emergency management apparatus and get prepared in the event we would have to make an evacuation. We informed them precisely that this was not an order for evacuation. So that went down through their apparatus Then we started to notify the other two counties as to what the problem was. Subsequent to that, in just a matter of a few minutes, Maggie Reilly of DER, came back and said, no it would not be necessary, that, if there was an offiste release it was very, very slight and very questionable, simply that. All This evolved due to release of information from various sources. Keeping in touch with DER l
as to what was the status at the plant. So we don't numerous calls.
The data that we were l
receiving was coming from DER in turn was coming from the plant, NRC, and
.g.
Federal agencies who were on site And they were passing things on to us.
Gerusky Oick, you might include some time sequence on notification to comonwealth ag encies.
Lam son Well, right after 7:35 when I notified the director of the problem, Jim Loquith(?)
our planner, walked by my door and realizing the criticality of the problem, and amongst some friendliness hollered, " Jim". He started to call, again going back over the initial calls.
We called the counties again, just backing up what Clarence Deller had pointed to, and then we started calling the State agencies.
Henderson We are talking about three counties now. We are talking about Dauphin, Lancaster and York.
Lamison We started to call all the State agencies, notifying them as to what was the status of Three Mile Island and, of course, we did that twice - one,e when I got the call from the shift supervisor and subsequently when Maggie called the office on the emergency situation.
Henderson After I got notified of the 8:35 information of the general emergency, I attempted to reach the Lt. Governor who is Chairman of our Council.
He had already departed for the office and wn in route, he lives at Indiantown Gap which is a 20 minute drive. At that time, I had not yet learned back from J
. Maggie that evacuation might not be possible. So I then notified the Governor about 7:45 that we had a general emergency at the Three Mile Island and that it could be serious.
It was about 9:15-9:20 that morning before I finally got a hold of the Lt. Governor and informed him of the situation. At that time, we had received word back from Maggie Reilly of DER that evacuation of Brunner Island and Goldsboro was not necessary.
Tom, do you have anything on your contacts with TMI during this period?
Gerusky. DER Ycs, unfortunately. We submitted a letter to the President's Commission detailing exactly the sequence of events, the time frame of the first three days of the accident during g can give you a copy. There is no problem with that.
It is more accurate than my recollection will be.
But Bill Dornsife received a call about 7:02 from Clarence Deller as per the Emergency Plan. He then contacted Margaret Reilly first and then tried to contact the plant. He had a problem getting through to the plant. The switchboard operator could not hook him up directly to the plant and he was informed that they would call him back. They called him back within a minute and told him that they had a problem, a site emergency, the sequence of events that had occurred at the reactor that, I don't recall exactly, it is all in the document, I didn't bring it along.
I wasn't sure what this was going to be about. Anyway, Bill, while he was on the phone noted that there was quite a bit of confusion in the office.
He was given to the Health Physicist or the Health Physics representative to be updated. At that time, alarms were ringing and things were happening in the control room, and the Health Physicst said they were evacuating part of the plant and he had to leave. He couldn't talk to them anymore, and off he went and hung l
up. Bill thought this is ridiculous, I can't do anything here anyway.
By that
. time the sequence of events had been such that we were getting back to answering phones in our office, so he started in for the office. After Maggie had received a call from Bill at about 7:04, she called me, which is the sequence of events, to xeSt contact the,_ result of the people to tell them to get into the office. The first one in the office opens up the direct line with the utility.
I was the fir t one in the office about 7:20-7:25 and got the control room on the telephone and they filled us in on:what was happening and very shortly said they would be going from a site emergency to a general emergency.
That there were high dose rates in the containment building and calculated exposure, with the wind in the direction that it was going, the calculated exposure in Goldsboro would have been 10R per hour, from noble gasses. By that time I believe the State Police helicopter was there on the site and we requested that they go by helicopter to Goldsboro and verify.
In the meantime, we contacted PEMA on the other phone to tell them that it was possible that evacuation was necessary. This was a calculation based upon a leak rate in the containment of one percent per day and they did not have high pressure in containment; therefore they didn't believe there would be any problem. The offsite monitors at that time did not indicate that there was any radiation or any 0
onsite,butwedidn'twanttotakeanychanges. So shortly the helicopter infor-mation was that there was no problem. They were still going to send surveyers over by land over to the West side of the river to continue the survey, but no l
releases had occurred at that point, according to the information that they got.
We then called off the PEMA evacuation alert. That was between 7:30 and 8:00 on the 28th. We maintained the open line with the reactor, I guess for a couple of weeks. The next event that I recall happening was a call from Charlie Meinhold at Brookhaven offering the services of the DOE emergency team.
I guess this was about 9:00 in the morning. The first day, the first couple of days we do not
, have in our logs very good. We started to take information down from the first telephone call We picked it up again probably the next evening. However, copies of our complete log of everything - there was all the information that we were given on the telephone and so fcrth. Copies were also made of that and sent to the President's Commission at their request. The infor-mation that we had from the plant at the timc through the open line was that there were no offsite problems, they didn't anticipate any offsite problems and that, at that t.me, there was r.c need for any additional help. We told Charlie to hold, yet keep ready and that if anything happened that would require his services we would call him. About 10:45 we were notified that they were detecting levels of radiation onsite and offsite, and we put in a call to 00E to Charlie Meinhold asking for assistance. They arrived in the late afternoon by helicopter.
In the meantime, when the information became available that there was scme off site radiation, our people were sent out on survey teams, their people were out on survey teams. The NRC had arrived at between 9 and 10, and were there onsite.
We were talking with NRC people. We were concerned about iodine releases and we did not have portable air sampling equipment to determine iodine releases. How-ever, the utility did.
Gaut I want to cover that a little bit when we get into accident assessment.
I want to be sure we cover all notifications and the warning aspects before we get into that.
Gerusky l
Our other notifications were on up the line through to the Secretary.
It was i
interesting, that mcrning he was holding a staff meeting with all Sureau and l
j Division directcrs in the Museum Building. We sent one of the girls over to get l
l
. our PR -- public information -- officer. After learning how not to talk to the press during the f allout episode, we decided that, the phones were already ringing, we had to have somebody else take the information and give it out to the press. So we went over for the public information of ficer and an announcement was made at the staff meeting, as to what was happening at Three Mile Island and everybody, all the brass of the Department were there so it was no problem of informing them. At that point, I don't knew if the secretary had contacted Governcr's office.
I expected it to happen.
Henderson Let's take one more step in the notification. Kevin, at that time, what municipalities and by what means did you notify the municipalities? You are the only one here from the Five Mile Area.
Molloy The minicipalities were contacted by land line, by telephone, including London-derry, Middletown, Lower Swatara Township and Highspire.
In addition, we also reverified with the State Police. We called Lancaster and York Counties end notified our Red Cross. That was done approximately between 7:32 and 7:36, give or take a couple of minutes. At 7:36 we received a call on our 911 emergency telephone system, which one of my dispatchers answered it and it was Dick Dubiel from the Three Mile Nuclear Station.
I got on the phone with him, and he said that, I am quoting him now, "We are in for real.1 What type we are not sure.
We've got the core covered right now.
I don't think we've got a real big problem, but we have some bad radiation readings that could, in f act, be erroneous but we can't rely on that. Okay? What I need is, I need to get Maggie Reilly informed and back in touch with us as soon as possible. Okay?"
I said we would take care of it.
I think I called PEMA at that time, or maybe I called your l
~s o
, office, I don't remember to be quite honest. Things were going pretty rapidly.
Concerning the message that Maggie was to get in touch with him, by that time anyway.
About 7:43, I received a call from Maggie Reilly telling me what she knew about what was going on at that particular time.
Basically, up until about 9:00 or really for the rest of the day, we received phone calls from and we made phone calls to PEMA concerning the situation at the plant. We passed on what informa-tion we had to our locals. We also had a couple of requests from the nuclear f acility itself. One came in around 9:00. Apparently there were some aircraf t circling the cooling towers and asked us to cal: International Airport and see if we could get those aircraft cleared out. Also, that morning there was a request l
l l
for some trafficccontrol on Route 441 which runs by the plant, and they wanted us to block the traffic off. After scrne discussion, I think we 4
Williamson (?)
It was my request.
l Molloy l
Yeah, okay. Then we talked about it and decided initially to st art the mechanism to get a road block set up, and then the decision was n'ade that it would be better not necessarily to block the road. We also received another call from Three Mile l
Island some time before noon; reference:
boaters near the Island and pleasure l
craf t, I guess, were coming up to the Island and so forth and they wanted to see what we could do to get them away from the Island. That's basically what transpired that particular morning.
Henderson TY$
Prior to the key-in--m-y incident of 28 and 29 of March, our plans were in effect for only a five mile protective action area which would have effected only three
. c ount ies. On the 28th of March we had a meeting scheduled for Selings Grove which was to kick off at 9:00.
We made a judgment decision here that -- along toward 8:00 when we know all our county civil defense directors were probably en route to Selingsgrove -- that we ought to continue with that meeting.
It did not appear that this thing, although it had some seriousness to it, but not a requirement to cancel that meeting. As a consequence, we went ahead with our meeting. However, we did have a couple civil defense directors f all out.
You did not go up Kevin.
Molloy flo, I stayed.
Henderson Paul Leese of Lancaster County, was en route and he turned around and went back.
Tom Blosser and Bob Boyer, you both went to the meeting, didn't you?
Blosser & Boyer Yes.
Henderson I guess that is the first time you heard of it up there.
Is that...?
Blosser I was notified at 8:31 a.m.
Henderson At Selingsgrove?
Blosser At my office; I was en route.
l
, Lamison Some time between 8:30 in the morning and 9:00 we started to pass information to the other counties. Contiguous to th.is particular area outside the five mile range, which included Lebanon County, Cumberland County, and Perry County, and it was sometime in there, I don't recall precisely when, we notified Maryland.
Henderson We also notified DCPA.
Lamison That is correct. We notified DCPA, Region 2 of the problems. These people are not in the official call list for the five mile. By that time we had completed, on several occasions, going back further.
I might say it was our observation, the notification list went precisely as intended in the plan. The times were the absolute minimum from start to finish on all planned calls, on each and every occasion that we implemented the notification list.
Gaut Does this pretty much cover the notification warnings?
Bob Furrer, Agriculture Would it be appropriate at this time to let the West Shore people comment on the notification of municipalities. Up to this point w haven't heard anybody say anything about Goldscoro and how they were notified.
Williamson, PEMA l
The record should reflect that the Ycrk County emergency preparedness coordinator l
was in Ycrk County, not at the meeting in Selingsgrove. We were in repeated contact with York County, and York County alerted the subdivisions that would l
be in the five mile area which are Fairview Township, Goldsboro, York Haven and
r
. another Township... Newberry. Those four political subdivisions.
I don't have any timing on that. They were notified as part of the 7:30 to 8:00 notifica-tion by York County.
Gaut Did that pretty well cover the notification aspects?
Evans, State Police 7:14 my desk officer, Troop H, Harrisburg, received a call from Ronald Warren, mechanical engineer from TMI stating that, due to mechanical difficulties, a state emergency had been declared. At 7:20 we dispensed one patrol car and two troopers for traffic control *at the north and south gates and at 7:35 the control unit supervisor from Harrisburg called back to Ronald Warren to conform that an emergency existed.
I'l like to interject at this time, when our Troop H head-quarters was located here at 21st and Herr Streets, that's prior to moving to our new location, we had a Red line telephone with TMI. Of course it's primary purpose is in case of hostile invasion. We do run practice sessions with TMI people concerning hostile invasion. At our new location we didn't have that telephone system but I understand that we are in the process of getting that in.
At 7:50 the officer of the day for Troop H was contacted at his home by Troop H York Station personnel reporting that a spill of radioactive material had been made into the Susquehanna River and that there was a request to close Route 30 in the vicinity of.the River. When the commanding officer camer on station, which was 8:05, he contacted Greg(?) Hitz at TMI and was advised that the Unit 2 had an onsite emergency and that he was requesting Troop traffic control and also the use of our helicopter. At 8:15 the connanding officer of Troop H then contacted George Kunder, TMI Supervisor, Unit 2 who adivsed that a general
. emergency existed at Unit 2.
There was no offsite release and the problem was contained within Unit 2.
However, he did request the Division of Traffic Control for Route 441 to direct the north gate and the south gate and observation tower and he requested a helicopter to fly a monitoring team down river. And then we had our helicopter in service at 8:40 and we continued working with personnel in TMI and monitoring team. Sometirre during the early afternoon, Kevin Molloy, Dauphin County Civil Defense, called the commanding officer, Troup H and told him he had received a report of high radiation readings on route 441. We were unable to verify readings, and therefore we made a decision not to close the road.
Later in the afternoon there was liaison with TMI requesting York Station to dispatch four units to the Geldsboro area for general protection, psychological reassurance to the general public and to provide communication needed to take radiation readings using the CDD 700 survey meter.
So generally, we did not treat this as a dangerous situation until we learned Friday morning through indirect means, that conditions mere serious than we were led to believe at this time. And when I say we learned indirectly, the Commonder Troup 45 Highspire was advised by the Turnpike Commission, Executive Director that he received informa-tion to prepare evacuation plans out of the Administrative Building at Highspire.
We tried to contact PEMA and the lines were busy. We tried various ways of getting through to we ended up contacting the Capitol Police in person. Our telephone systems were overloaded.
l Henderson I
What time was this?
Ev ans Commander of Area 5 callec Captain Everly at 9;24.
It was right af ter that we tried to make our phone call.
Captain Everly, C0 Troop H contacted
, and that's when we learned the more serious nature of TMI at 9:26. Because of our communications problem in trying to determine what was going on we went to emergency status at 10:00 on Friday the 30th of March. We :ctivated our Gaut Does that pretty well cover notification across the board here?
Welch, Health Department I would like to add, we"wete... I did not have the exact tice we were notified on Wednesday.
On Wednesday and Thursday, the 28th and 29th, we were constantly updated by both PEMA and Gerusky at the Bureau of Radiation Health. On the reactors we were receiving we did not consider it an emergency situation.
Gaut Let ne throw out the general question, then, at this point, of from what we discussed before or what we discussed up to this time, does anybody ahve any candid comments about what they would have seen immediately as an improvement over here what happened, what actually took place? Would there have been better systems better served by rearranging certain things?
In retrospect what is your thoughts on this.
Henderson Well, as iar as the event occurring between 4:00 and 7:02 on our notification, I have no judgment on that whether we should have been notified earlier and whether we would have treated it any differently than we did treat it at the time, I am not too certain with the kind of inf ormation that we were getting.
t I think the information that we got from the plant was just part of the procedure
. that we have arranged. They give us the bare minimum and that's what we want.
We've been on the Bureau of Radiation Protection and Department of Environmental Resources to get back to the plant and to take the tcchnical jargon and put it into laymen's language and give us a recomendation of what's happened. So I think as f ar as I (end of tape)
~
(beginning of tape):
Gerusky I think probably the lack of information the State Police had
\\
communications between us and the. State Police I guess we had te c.ea W %
addumed that they had been active as much information as we were from the plant about the seriousness o-f the accident. That's something we should really try and correct since they are one of the first organizations involved provide them with information which we apparently didn't do.
I agree that we didn't call State Police at all.
Henderson Well, we talked with the State Police here as we did to other State agencies, and then at 8:40, almost immediately, witnin five minutes from our first notification at 8:40 of the serious event, we immediately activated our response team mect.anism here. Now, of course it takes thirty minutes to fourty-five minutes for the various members of our State response team to get in here. But we i
started the machinery immediately, within five minutes af ter that initial notification in response We were still calling some of the close in agencies. _
a
. Williamson During the period of Wednesday to Thursday all of the information that we received either from Radiation Protection or the plant we passed on to Commonwealth agencies that were part of this, that were involved in the emergency process.
It was rather limited, but we gave them everything that we had.
Henderson,
I don't know where the breakdown was. At about 11:30 the morning of the 28th the Lt. Governor held a press conference. Attending the conference at least on the platform that day was Lt. Governor Scrar. ton, Ray Holtsy of the Energy Office, Bill Dornsife of DER and myself. And we were publicly notifying the cities of Pennsylvania that there would be no further releases from Three Mile Island untill it was announced in advance. And the question and answer period went on till about 12:30 and when we left the conference at 12:30 we had to go up and brief the Governor, and on our way up there we discovered that a release had started at 11:00 and was continuing. And that was one of the first breakdowns apparently in communications between TMI and, I guess, DER.
-Gerusky No. We were aware of that at 10:45 there was a release. We sent people down.
Bill had already left, he was heading for the Lt. Governor's office and w couldn't find him, so he didn't get the information till after the press conference was over. We didn't realize that the press conference was delayed. We thought that he was going over to brief the Lt. Governor and go innediately to the press conference. Apparently, the press conference was delayed by at least an hour.
We were talking to the plant about 8:30 and went there about 9:00, At 10:45, when
l
. the release occurred, and we figured the press conference was already over and started Henderson In looking at this in retrospect, the time of day I think, partly influenced what we were doing because there were no agencies open except ourselves.
tiormal traffic it was probably exercising notification aspects through our normal system which is telephone. This, I think is a matter of concern and we are all saying this, and the point is that there has to be adequate comunica-tions. Primary agencies accomplished Gerusky And direct comunications to the plant Lamison This soon became our problem. There was 30-40 minutes lapse between calls between DER, myself and other agencies, and a just couldn't get through.
Henderson There was a telephone overload. That was on Friday. But on Wednesday and Thursday we did not experience that kind of a delay.
Gerusky And also, we had no problem with the line to the f acility and in maintaining that, but if that plant had been beyond our normal area and no one had talked on it for a few minutes the line would have been cut off. So we were taling about, not Three Mile Isl:nd, tut other reactor sites that are away from our office and we need that open line. We have to have a direct line-we can't rely upon telephone
lines. And somebody could have taken the telephone and hung it up, and then we would have had a hell of a problem getting back. With a direct line all you do is pick up and it will ring on the other end and you got them, and it works very well.
Henderson Under emergency conditions when we'are in full operation down here, this is for your own information, we have 126 separate wire lines that are servicing this org anizat ion. These are the emergency numbers for the state agencies and their%
telephone system completing our switchboard. We also had 100 line reserve, trupk reserve here, so we can extend this system by up to 100 lines if it were dictated, already in this f acility.
Gerusky There was one other problem with information between the Bureau of Radiation Protection and PEMA.
There were times when we were not updating PEMA on what was happening. And one of the prob.lems was we didn't have someone from our shop over here who could take that information an@ut it into terms that we could explain tc ather people. Thit happened throughout the whole incident. We didn't have a staff capability on a 24-hour basis to do that, but there was no question l
that it has to be done in the future no matter what our staff. That's one of the biggest lessons we learned, that we have to have people here to get the information out to the counties to what is happening.
If we had someone stationed here on an open line to our office we would have had that information in terms that people can understand.
And we didn't do that and we were requested and we said we don't have the staff, which was a mistake. We should have had someone over here no matter how bad our problems were.
. Williamson We have here and at TMI a couple of cases at TMI warning system. They were of little assistance to the general prob'em because Tom, in Radiation Protection, was so involved at their own f acility that they couldn't work their way out of there to come up here. Where there is a hotline and radio contact with the plant and to talk to counties and mayors So we had a resource there that wasn't utilized.
paut What you're saying, Craig, is that Tom's croposal that they have a man over, it would have been a greater resource, good resource at that point, but inasmuch as you didn't have somebody to do the job.
Williamson We weren't in the technical business, we were depending on Radiation Protection for... af ter the initial contact by the plant, then PEMA theoreticall,< doesn't do business directly with the plant anymore. We expect the plant to ccm to radiation protection to be the contact with PEMA.
Molloy One other commur.ications resource that is available that wasn't working properly at the time tut in the Dauphin County Emergency Operations Centar we monitored the
(
control room frequency for Met Ed, and they in turn monitor our county fire frequencies. We do have this communication capability.
Williamson And we monitor the same frequency.
. i Gaut In one generic source of communication that we didn't cover and I think we can probably dispatch this rather handily here. We talked about communications, counties, cities, states and cot 9.ies or interstate, how about communications with Federal agencies, DOE, NRC, wi.=t were... I know from our point of view what we felt, but I'd rather hear what you ha..,
say about it.
Henderson Well, as f ar as PEMA is concerned, this is no problem. Our only contact with Federal agencies is Federal Disaster Assistance Administration and/or DCPA, and primarily in the early days it was just with DCPA and we merely provided them over the teletypewriter system copies of our situation reports.
Gerusky f
And we have no problems with communications with the people at D0R or the NRC people on site or regional office. There obv.iously was a problem with communica-tions in Washington.
Welch, Health Departnent I agree with that. Federal people at the site we had no problem with, but our c
primary cont.ern was NRK. This was Friday on, insisting that all communications with the vaaiou3 heelth agencier, DEW, etc., cene through the White House, Jack t
Watson, wnich in hura p'aved havoc w;th $c. here onsite, because NRC was briefing
/
people in 4ashingto1, and they wcra not on the site.
For example, Secretary Califano advised potsss'um iodide be administered to the workers at the plant and to be issued to 1.he general population in the area. And, of course, we disagreed with this and were not notified in advance, which prasented a very awkward situation.
0
. Gerusky There was probably a breakdown in comunications too.
Welch No, it wasn't a breakdown in comunications.
Gerusky From here,-from my shop to your shop. Because we were called by John Villforth of HEW, Bureau of Rad Health.
I don't know when, but I think it was Thursday, it may have been Friday, asking if we would like them to provide us with potassium iodide for the general public in case of radiation leak. We said yts. At that point with the Secretary I mt with Secretary of Health, Deputy Secretary of Health, to discuss, to tell him it was coming in, we would like them to take tra responsibility for it cause we couldn't handle it. And also the health related problems. And so they weren't notified and they weren't even given a choice whether or not KI was coming.
I had already made the decision over the telephone that the KI was coming and then I informed them. That probably was wrong, but at that point we had no... the emergency planning had taken place prior to Three Mile Island did not include very much activity by the Department of Health under the previous administration. So we had little-- we didn't think about informing the Department of Health or asking them if they wanted us to do it. We had mainly used the Department of Health staff on potassium iodide prior to the new idministration taking over. And I can relate, might as well get it on the record, that was one of the problems in this emergency, wts the newness of all the cabinet members, because none of them knew we were available, what was going on or who the playtrs were. We had to spend alot of time during the first couple of days briefing the cabinet members on-- the Department of Agriculture, for example, on what could happen with iodine in milk and assist them in making l
decisions where with previous episodes of radioactive f allout, the other cabinet members knw what was going on and we knew that was taking time.
Unf ort unately, it just occurred two months after the new administration took over, and only a week or so after the new Secretary of Health came up here. So we didn't have the chance to meet with, or talk to them prior to the energency which we would have done had it occurred later on.
Welch No, Tom, I have no heartburn there. We agree at the Governor's office that we would take over.
Gerusky Yeah, but I had made the decision that it was coming in.
Welch Our problem concerned Washington issuing instructions and making recommendations and we did not have a direct line to the Surgeon General or to Secretary Calif ano.
As a matter of f act, Saturday mcrning I spent about 20 minutes on the phone trying to get in touch with Secretary Calif ano and the switchboard operator told me she didn't have an emergency number for him. And we were then trying to treat the situation in a Iuw key manner and at the same tine not to have any credibility gap on this administration. By the time we received the potassium iodide, the first shipment arrived about a little after midnight on Sunday, there were 11,000' bottles, 6,000 of them were not labeled at all. Later shipments were scheduled but we had different sized bottles, different sized droppers, the quality control was very bad, there was foreign material in then, they were leaking. All together we received about 250,000 bottles which 237,000 were unusuable. Also, there must i
have been about 300,000 or 400',000 eye droppers which we had to calibrate to l
determine the approrpiate dose. The appropriate dose is approximately 130 milli-1 I
grams and of course with the determination of the radiation health people we brought in we felt that 65 milligrams would do.
Gaut Let me see if I can pull it back to our earlier...
Willi amson I have one-more thing, Harold, that ought to be included in notification or communications. Starting late Friday night and concluding sometime early Saturday morning, we installed in five of the six counties a hot line, we're now out to working to six counties. A hot line for each of the counties in here was installed and in conjunction *with the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency starting sometice Saturday and concluding, I guess in the last county sometime Sunday, we established a radio net with their personnel and equipment in all six counties.
With net control here in this f acility.
So we had dedicated land line and radio in addition to everything else, teletype and our other means of communication.
Gerusky One of the things we found that we did not have communications with our field i
i people nor the NRV people out in the field or the DOE people out in the field and so we went to our Forestry program which had a radio system, they had radios and stuff out and got radio cars so that we could talk back and forth with our people, our surveying people.
And we got from PEMA 25 walkie-talkie devices so that we could communicate between offices and the telephones were useless.
l And so wa needed radio communications just from the secretary so somebody could say a call us on the phone when you've got an open line. So the tele-phones were completely ties up.
. Henderson We fortunately had about 100 portable radios which we maintained here and about 75 of those were issued to state and federal agencies in order that they could talk while they were moving and wre separated from the telephone lines.
Gerusky After Friday also direct lines were installed from Headquarters, f1RC from Head-quarters,. HEW, 00E's... DOE was located out at Harrisburg-Yrok Airport and had a direct line with them and Federal staff who would be on the phones with the people out in the field and in Washington. We also got two additional two or three additional lines including to our office but with unknown telephone numbers so that people couldn't be calling in. The telephone use those lines quite easily helped us enormously access until the lines got tied up completely then there was no way except by radio. And on Friday morning we could do it by radio, we had radio on Friday.
The first four days were all one big day with two hours of sleep in each 24 hours2.777778e-4 days <br />0.00667 hours <br />3.968254e-5 weeks <br />9.132e-6 months <br />.
I can't tell you exactly what day it was excpet I remember Friday morning and that week communications had to be done by running over to the Governor's officel_
and over here and talking to people.
Gaut I think we have pretty well covered the subject of communications, warning, and notification.
Williamson Just one additional thing.
Fce the period of probably four or five hours starting from mid-morning on Friday the 30th until mid-afternoon, the Commonwealth's telephone system in this area was so swamped with calls that you couldn't get 1
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. a dial tone. That was the origin of many of the agencies' problems that the Cocoonwealth met.
Ev ans Many times we have an emergency situation telephone lines are always Based on our experience we put a moble command post down at the observation tower on Friday radio systems as a means of communication Because our moble command post was there, NRC did utilize that we gave them half our office space and four lines so that could have communications.
Gaut The next material I think we should cover gets into the problem we perceive and I think we all perceive with the Three Mile Island is that so many of the areas 4
crowd into other areas and lap over. There was not alot of clean-cut definitions between alot of things that happened. Therefore we're lumping some of these things and the ones that I would like to lump rogetter at this point and I think they will fit together are the accident assessment and exposure control.
I think they sort of played back and forth and you could not have one without the other.
So I think with that let's go ahead with that paAticular aspect. Who wants to kick off?
Gerusky 1
One of the problems, we were getting information from the plant and the NRC staff an the site and I believe that it was information that they believed to be accurate.
I have a feeling that, at the time, the Met Ed staff was playing
. down the accident and still giving us the proper information. The inf ormation they assumed to be correct.
I think there was some difference between what was real and what they thought. was real. And, for example, they knew they had f ailed fuel on their first telephone call. They knew they had radiation in the containment. They knew they had no offsite problems and ~ they were giving us that information.
I don't think... it was obvious that they didn't know what was really going on in the reactor. The information we had was what they believed was going on in the reactor and so therefore I can't... there was no problem that I can see with the information we were getting because we were getting what they believed to be happening. And NRC verified that over the phone and in person and in meetings in the Governor's office and the Lt. Governor's office and in press conferences held. So the accident assessment or the hardware assessment..
problems with the hardware, were not accurate, but they were as good as we could get them anyway. Although there are conflicting statements, statements by the utility playing down the accident, statements by the NRC playing up the accident and we had no... the information was correct. The information was the same except their attitude toward the incident was different. And I think that was one of the problems with this information. And then on top of that we questioned the statements that were coming out of Harrisburg the NRC people in Harrisburg.
Gaut Do you want to highlight some of those?
Gerusky I don't remember the exact time sequence. There were... in the Governor's office
.ve all spent an awful lot of time in the Governcr's office the first week and a half, I'd say, but being over there one cf the press people walked in with a t
, copy that just came off the wire saying a statement came out of Washington that evacuation was imminent, meltdown was possible at any tine, that the hydrogen bubble situation was so serious that evacuation w.is imminent. All of this information came out of Washington until the Governor got on the phone with the President and with Joe Hendrie and had agreed the information from that point on would cone out of two NRC sources on the site and the Governor's office on Friday and that Met Ed would not be putting out any press releases. That solved much of the problem, however, the problems had already been created by statements made in Washington.
Different Speaker (?)
Well, to back that up, Tom, we received a call about 8:30 on Friday from Fr. Collins.
Gerusky That was not... Do you want to go on that?
Welch I believe he is on the NRC. staff, he's a nuclear expert, and he reconsnended that we should consider evacuation.
Gerusky I didn't try to take that into the sequence of what happened. Collins...
Henderson I received a call at 9:15 Friday morning from Collins advising us of the serious-ness of the situation at Three Mile Island and that the NRC was making a policy recommendation that we evacuate 10 miles... out to 10 miles.
, Gerusky In what direction?
Henderson In all directions. No, I'm sorry. Downwind. At that time we had a very unstable wind so we immediately related this to him that if we did any evacuation at this time we would have to go to 360. However, we had no plans at this time for a 10 mile evacuation.
I relayed this to the Lt. Governor and consequently about 10 minutes after the first call Harold called me back to inform me that this was not only his recommendation... not only the staff's recommendation, but this had the backing of the Chairman of thp NRC. About five minutes later the Lt. Governor called me and said, bey, who in hell is this Harold Collins.
Welch Well, I wasn't aware that be spoke with you, but we spoke with him about 8:30.
Henderson Okay, you talking about another conversation's then.
Welch Earlier.
Different Speaker (?)
Yes, and you took it over on the side.
Gerusky i
It was after the call to you, because you called us and said that Collins had called a recommended evacuation.
. Henderson That was 9:15.
Gerusky I don't remember the time. The time may be off, it doesn't matter. And we got back to Collins and tried to find out why the recommendation was made. Maggie and Bill Dornsife were on the phone with Collins and the conversation was rather intere sting.
I wish that tape was going on. But, we were asking why and it is based upon an above 1200 MR per hour reading in a helicopter survey, which they had somehow gotten a hold of the information, and we had our people onsite, offsite and one the site everybody was getting levels of radiation that were con-sistent with the levels of radiation that we received the day before. Maybe a f actor or two higher,10 MR, 20 MR in a couple of spots.
But nothing to indicate the need for any immediate evacuation. And we told them this on the phone and he said it didn't make any differences. We said well who recommended it? He 'said, well, the brass. And maggie said there are going to be a lot of brass asses down there, tell me who it is. And he says no, I'm just telling you the brass is here.
I'm looking around the room and the Chairman over there, and so forth. Well, did the Chairman recommend it? Well, the brass recommended it. App arently, then... and be said that's it. We're recommending the evacuation. We said well we're going to tell them not to evacuate because there is no reason to.
l l
I was on the phone with the Island talking to the NRC peoplecat the time said,
" Hey, Collins is recommending an evacuation, is;there anything going on there that requires evacuation?" and they said no.
It was no different than it was before except that they are allowing releases that we didn't know about, but the levels aren't that high. And so we told Collins we were going to not recommend i
ev acuat ion. We were going to recorrend against it. Apparently, we got back to Civil Defense, we tried to get back to Civil Defense, the line was tied up.
e
, Apparently, Collins then called Civil Defense back after we had talked to them and said, hey it wasn't me recommending it, it was Joe Hendrie recommending it.
We then went from the... Randy and I went to the Governor's office and Maggie stayed in the office and Bill came over here to say that we had talked to Collins and there was no need for an evacluation. We got to the Governor's Office, the Governor was about on the phone or was shortly after on the phone with Chairman Hendrie and he asked him the question about who is Collins and Hendrie said I don't know anybody named Collin3 and we don't recommend evacuation.
If we did it was wrong and we made a mistake. So at that time everybody in the Commonwealth who was involved in this decision... in this problem, was just completely mad.
Everybcdy was burning. And at that point we called the President saying, ehy get somebody up here. That's how the situation really happened.
But by that time, everybody else when they finally discovered the bubble and people were making statements to the press, just constantly and they kept changing and they weren't relling us. We had no direct communications with NRC, except for the NRC Headquarters, except from the Chairman and the Governor.
In f act that Chairman said we don't know what's going on either. We better get somebody up here. The recommendation concerning evacuation of pregnant women and small children was'.a give and take between the Governor and Joe Hendrie.
Hendrie said that if his wife was pregnant and he had small children in the area j
he would move them out because he didn't know what was going to happen in the future. That decision was made and he said... well we said what distance are you talking about and he said a couple of miles. We said we can't go a. couple of miles, so we'll go five miles, and we can't go two year olds or one year olds, we got to go preschool and then we'll shut down the schools in the area. That all happened Friday morning.
Welch Well that happened when.we first went there.
. Gerusky Whatever tire that was, it had to be...
if it was 9:15 and Collins got the call it had to have been after 9:15. That was one of our problems.
Williamson The telephone call that Tom and Randy are referring to happened between 9:22 and 9:45. Sometime Friday morning.
Welc h We had spcken with him earlier and left for the Governor's office. Well. the Governor called for us actually, and at that time I advised the Governor that the Secretary of Health recommended evacuation of pregnant women and children under two and we did not support Collin's theory of evacuation of the area. And the Governor considered even the movement with the information that we had at that time which was primarily from TMI and Tom (Gerusky) and there was really no low level radiation problem and the Governor was sitting on the evacuation problem and that's when he decided to get Chairman Hendrie on the phone. So when Chairman Hendire indicated as Tom just stated that he would not recommend evacuation but, if his wife and childrefk was in the area, if his wife was pregnant he would certainly move j
them out.
Henderson There is one other interesting aspect of this whole thing here, is that when Collins called me at 9:15 and I logged the call at the termination of the call, l
so we had about a three minute conversation, so it was 9:12 to 9:15 when Collins called me, it was on the scheme of evaucation out to 10 miles, I asked him if he was aware that our plans were for five mile evacuation, he was uncertain as to what our evacuation plans were.
I asked him to explain to me why the 10 miles.
l How they arrived at the ten miles. And he was unable to explain the 10 miles except he left me w'th the opinion that it had just been pulled out of the air I
. i and there was no rhyme or reason for it.
I assured him that we would not evacuate 10 miles, we would give consideration to 5 miles. Back on the same thing on this accident assessant. There was a great amount of suspicions being generated here during this period by the press, that all of the basic instrumen-tation readings were coming out of TMI and that the 'IRC was taking these and regurgitating them in one way and the state was taking them and passing them out in another way and yet everybcdy was dependent-on the same basic information and there was alot of press concern and interest in this specific...
And you sat in on some but I was in on three or four press conferences between Wednesday and Friday at which this kept coming out, even when the NRC representa-tivaes were on the scene before Denton came on the scene, when the two representa-tives from the region were on the scene.
C+r usky Yeah, well one of the things that I guess we didn't make known to the press was that the DOE teams were them making some surveys, our teams were making surveys, NRC was making surveys and the utility was making surveys. The information concerning what was going on at the plant inside the plant was coming from the utility and NRC. All the readings were the same. We weren't having any problem with the data we were getting from the reactor people..We were talking to Health Physics people all the time and they were routir!ely providing us with data and.that data was verifiable by our own data. And by the DOE data and by NRC. So there wasn't any problem, in our opinion, with the information that we were getting and the validity of the data.
Earlier on in the episode we want to back up a little bit, I started to say that when the first releases occurred we were notified of the first releases about 10:45-11:00, we were concerned about iodine releases from the containment, something you wculd expect from a nuclear power plant accident is l
radioiodines.
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t
. and we didn't have the capability to portable monitor the field for Iodine evalua-tions, but the utility did and they were getting on some of air samples indications of high iodine using a SAM 2 survey recorder. We requested, because of some of their data indicated no iodine, some indicated iodine, so the high backgrounds in their counting crew onsite since the NRC trailor was not yet available to them. We requested that... they wanted verification of iodine and so did we, so a helicopter flew up from the Island to Holy Spirit Hospital landing pad we pick up the charcoal cartridge and ran it over to our lab, analyzed the cartridge, and could find no iodine.
It's all xenon, there was so much there it was showing up in the iodine channels. And we did that with three or four more samples later in the day where GeUU iodine was detected and again rione was found using a.deMy detector.
So we were convinced at that point that iodine was not a significant problem and that the problem was external exposure to xenon. The DOE aircraft was there, they were analyzing iodine. DOE's team No one was finding iodine, except on the charcoal filters where xenon was also being picked up. Further examination showed no iodine.
Williamson One other essential ingredient in perhaps the damage assessment - at 8:40 Friday morning the 30th, our operations desk received a call from the plant indicating that there had been an uncontrolled release and went on to request PEMA's assis-tance in getting through to Rad Protection. They were having difficulty completing their call and indicated that the plant was making preparations for possible evacuation. Our operations desk logged the call as being from some one who was very excited. So we had this at 8:40, at 9:15 a call from Collins in Washington l
or Bethesda and before we could get confirmation back from Rad Protection, we had i
. the request from the Governor as to our recommendation, PEMA's recommendation, as to what steps he might consider.
Lamison We had two calls at 8:40, they came in on two desks. One as you had recited it the other one was the 1200 w, 600 feet above the stack plus, if I remember correctly,10 or 15 x at the gate.
Henderson And also in one of the messages said we need help.
Lamison
+
Yes, that was one I think that Craig was talking about.
Molloy Craig, at 8:34 on Friday morning, Dauphin County received a call from Jim Flow in reference to a release to the environment, have PEMA agency call iraddiately.
I contacted the agency and talked to Karl Keene in reference to the call received from Jim Floyd. At 8:54, I received a call back from Jim Cassidy at PEMA indicating another onsite emergency occurrence experienced an increase in the reading s.
So our initial call of any of the problems at TMI came at 8:34.
Henderson I think before we tried to call him he had gotten in to us.
Gerusky The interesting thing was while Floyd was making a lot of these calls, we had an open line to the control room, or the secondary team, their emergency operations l
room at the time because the control room had problems with radiation so they had moved the telephone to the Unit I control room. The information we had over the phone was completely different than what Floyd was telling PEMA.
. Williamson This was the first direct contact w'd had with the plant since the initial notification Wednesday morning.
Henderson That's correct. And this is when we recognized that we had a more serious incident on hand. This is when we started activating our response team mechanism. And, as I recall, in that conversation also he said we have our own busses. We will do our own evacuation to the South.
I guess in many respects our expectations began to rise that we've got a serious problem on here and when the Collins' call came in we were almost expecting something of this nature and it added to what we had already gleamed from our earlier conversation.
Gaut To be specific, who is the we you are saying had their own busses?
Henderson TMI.
4 Williamson Hight cdd just to set the picture, on Friday morning, I believe it was a general consensus 4hd 4be h""Y" Y (end of tape)
(beginning of tape):
9,fgedn < cab 4/ cd if w eM be t n e old Sdukan"1 g g,,,p j n,,fg, g/ gf Henderson -
TMI was running into a snag and it would be delayed for an houror two.
It was a slow buildup over a two or three hour period. We have already activated our defense.. our duty officer in here.
But we felt from midnight on, its just a
V
. of a few minutes and this thing will be... somebody's going to pull a switch and everybody can go home and we'll work it out later. So this gave us pretty cold Gerusky The indications on Thursday evening were that the radioactivity in the plant was coming from water that had closhed over onto the floor of the aux building from the reactor containment, it was pumped from the sump pump. And that was the only source of radioactivity. And that was being kept under control and going through the filters. The information on Friday morning was that there was an " uncontrolled release" and after we found out that it wasn't uncontrolled, it was planned by the utility to release radioactivity, to release gasses because they needed to because of problems with some of the gas holdup tanks. But we got that information over the phone that it was controlled and the other information coming to us saying it was uncontrolled and that caused problems for the press and for us to determine whether they could stop it. Apparently, they could not stop it, once the valves lifted they were open until they could get the valves closed. This caused a problem with the public information man's assessment of how long it is going to continue.
Henderson Tom, this suprises me because the congressional record that I've got here within in the past month when Floyd and other members of the Shift Supervisors were appearing before the Senate hearing on this subject they tere still unable to get anybody to admit from that crowd that this was controlled or uncontrolled.
Gerusky Floyd said that he ordered it be done because of future problems in case they needed those tanks. The information later by the NRC witness was that' be... He also
. stated he had received approval from NRC to go ahead with the procedure'and NRC said no that they had never given approval. That was what we had found out from hearing their testimony over the radio. But the information that we had from NRC people on site and from the control room was that there wasn't a problem.
Apparently Floyd was in the Unit 2 control room making those calls and he wasn't informing the emergency teams in Unit 1 that he was doing this.
I don't believe there was ever a site investigation.
Henderson
'de could gather from the message that we got that if there was not an actual site emergency that there was going to be one awful fast. We are preparing to evacuate people and we will take care of ourselves and you handle everything outside the plant. And it was not a recommendation that we evacuate, but it was a recommenda-tion that we better start leaning forward in the foxholes.
But I think the excitedness of his voice,.with Kevin also knew who this individual was, I felt was the f act that my watch officer, whoever took the call here said, hey this guy is going ape, which excited me a little bit too.
You've got a real problem.
Lamison(?)
We were standing close by when the officer took the call.
Gaut Let me see if we can draw this to a summary to a degree.
In effecting the exposure control through the protective responses that were made based upon whatever assessment you had from whatever source and you say there were several sources, is it safe to say that the protective actions that were contemplated were limited to evacuation and administration of KI as potential protective action. Would you i
i elaborate on this or contradict. it, or whatever.
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, Gerusky There was a take cover order.
Henderson The Governor put out the word at approximately 10:00 tliat he was recommending or advising all people in the 10 mile area of TMI to remain under cover until noon that day. That was about 10:00.
Different Speaker (?)
And shortly thereafter the siren went off.
Molly That was not set off by Dauphin County, I want that on the record. However, con-tinuing with this Friday morning thing, approximately 9;25 I received.:a call from Col. Henderson indicating to me that evacuation was imminent. And the impression I got was in a matter of 5 or 10 minutes or so. Which gave one the impression that he expressed he was under. What we immediately did was we put all of our fire dpeartments on standby within a 10 mile zone in their fire houses, and advised all the school districts to keep the kids inside, get their buses ready to move and so forth. We took what we felt was the proper action for our office to take.
In addition, I called WHP radio and I figured 5 minutes from now somebody was going to come up and say, Hey, we got to evacuate 10 miles, we better prepare the people a little bit.
I went on the radio and just indicated that apparently the situation at Three Mile Island had changed and the possibility could arise that evacuation might be called for. We were not saying evacuate. However, if an order ever did come down we wanted the people in certain communities to go to like the Harrisburg Garm Show, other people to go to the Hershey Sports Arena.
O
. To get them to what we call staging areas irnediately.
If they did have to leave their homes we wanted them to bring eye glasses, prescription medicines and things of that nature. We emphasized several times during the broadcast, and I don't know if anybody in here heard it or not, we emphasized several times that there was no need for an evacuation at this time, we were strictly telling them if it happened that's what we wanted them to do. And I think that's about the time the phone lines I don't know... you could look at it two ways. Perhaps I should have waited until we received a call back from the Governor's office, or NRC or whoever... in a few minutes that there was an actual evacuation would take place. We took the action we felt was proper.
Gaut Can you recall a time for this for the record?
Molloy Well, about 9;25 I got the call from Col. Henderson on Friday morni,ng. And I would say within a matter of 5 or 10 minutes after we accomplished our initial action which was notifying the police departments over our county police network, fire departments, and so forth, and the schools.
Gaut And these recommendations that you made then were predicated on the call from the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency?
Molloy Right.
Gaut With DER?
. Molloy No, this apparently is where the breakdown, somewhere took place.
Gerusky We tried to get back, after calling Collins, we tried to get back to Civil Defense and we couldn't get through. The telephone lines were tied up. So Bill Dornsife headed for Civil Defense and Randy and I headed for the Governor's Office. And Bill came over and recomrended to Col. Henderson that no evacuation take place.
That was after everything had already Molloy It would have been because we had started taking protection action.
Gaut I would like to insert parenthetically here something that I heard in the state.
We were in telephone communication with an open line with your office, Tom, and there was a phone lying on the desk and one of the expedience of making sure the line was open all the time was that I think one of your secretary's laid an extra radio that was playing so we.ould have it open. And so from time to time we'd pick up on that and one of your radio station, I wrote it down in my notes, it may have been WHP, a small station, i would gather, L local station, the kind that people listen to going to work, 24 hours2.777778e-4 days <br />0.00667 hours <br />3.968254e-5 weeks <br />9.132e-6 months <br /> a day, interviewed the representa-tive of PEMA, I think it may have been you, Col. Henderson,. and somebody from the State Police and was generally talking to the 16 cal populus in emphasizing listen to what was going on here, don't listen to Baltimore, don't listen to Philadelphia, don't listen to Washington; we'll tell you what's going on.
It was a very low key operation, very nicely done.
I don't know which station it was, but they should certainly be complemented on what they did.
1
-4 5 -
Williamson I would say Kevin's announcement was Gaut This may have been the one, but the disc jockey on duty that night, and it was during the early hours I recall.
Different Speaker (?)
That was Saturday night?
Gaut I think it was firday night and* Saturday morning.
Molloy On your particular point that you just said that we were saying don't listen to Baltimore and things of that nature, the reason for that being is that, my personal opinion, pe; ole in the now comprised 20 mile zone, were basically very calm, cool and collected. We were getting many calls from the citizens who had cousins living in California or an uncle in Philadelphia who just called and wanted to know why the hell they weren't getting out because the plant had blown up, was going to blow up, I think it was as early as Thursday night, I got a call from a station in Denver, and the guy wanted to know how the evacuation was going. And I'm sitting there drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. A lot of our problems came from the outside, not from the inside. The reports out of Washington were that attrotious that our county officer called the White House and respectfully requested that, and he used a few choice words, that their gentleten would quite making statements to the national media that the bubble is going to burst, 20,000 l
l
. people are going to die and so forth, because they did not understand the effect it was having on the general public. Our first couple of days were basically spent keeping the public calm, which we probably did a damn good job.
It was sure being ruined by people outside the area.
Henderson T' ey Bob Boyer from Lebanon County here did something I thought was very good.
h had a former County Civil Defense Director who was no longer the Civil Defense Director, but they sent him over to their local radio station and he stayed there and answered questions and made pronouncements over the air and assisted keeping cool.
In f act, one other radio, station got on the air, that I think it was Palmyra being evacuated, wasn't it Bob, and he was able to kill it almost immediately, ehy that's not offic.ial and listen only to this station for official announcements.
But that was one of the biggest jobs, was trying to maintain tension at a tolerable level and to... In f act we may be criticized P 3ae cases of trying to low key this in many respects, but this was our marching orders and I think the Governor made it very clear to all of us working around there that this was the level, and it was to go no higher. That he wanted to maintain this level of tension. Not increase this level.
Gerusky One of the criticisms that has occurred as a result of this experience is that people said they didn't now what the radiation levels were and that this information should have been made availath to thom. And one of our problems was that every-time we made a pronoucement concerning what the radiation levels were and when we went back to our offices we found out they were different. The thing was changing so rapidly at tne Island and the infnrmation we were getting was changing so rapidly that if we had someone at a radio statien putting out infcrmation, that information would be changin.so f ast it would look like we didn't know what we are
~47-doing. And we did know what we were doing. The problem is communicating with the public. We had a difficult time explaining what radiation was, and what the hazard was and to put it in per spective, I made a mistake of using a couple of chest x-rays, which still isn t too bod, but I didn't know how else to explain to people who know nothing abor, what a millirem means, and what 100 millirem means.
We made that estimate dur'ag the first day, that no one was receiving exposure in excess of 100 millirem, and in our field it held true.up to this date. We 're not over yet. Three Mile Island is f ar from over, I'd hate to say there won't be any more exposures.
But ther f acing, well what does that mean.
I tried to explain, well it's the same as you get living in Pennsylvania for a year and it's about the same as two or three chest x-rays to the chest.
It's very difficult on the platform up there in a press ennference to put that into perspective.
And to answer questions to the press, and the press is coming at you ten different ways, going back to questions that were previously answered. And one of the problems also was that the information... usually when we went into a press conference we first went through a briefing. That briefing may have taken an hour or so. We went to a press conference and the information we had was over an hour old.
It was hard to get the information updated for the press conference.
Henderson And the press were also monitoring some of the radio frequencies which the stations that were making their reports to DOE or elsewhere and they were trying to le specific in saying, well now you have a station headed by a guy named George and George called somebody at 11:01 a.m. and he reportdd this number. Now what does 1
that mean? So we had no knowledge of what the number was, who George was, where George was located, and so forth.
So it put whoever the spokesperson was at the
U
. time in a rather embarassing and delicate situation. To say the least of not being able to address that question specifically. And alot of the press, we had over 300 representatives of the news media in here from time to time, and they were pretty rough in those demands for precise information.
Welch Can I oack up and ask Tom a question.
You said we're not out of the woods yet.
Gerusky No, we're not out of the woods yet.
Welch I have made arrangements with HEW to pick that shipment up of KI.
i Gerusky I don't know.
I'll let you know.
Williams Another ingredient that led to the environment tim. prevailed late Wednesday and through until Friday morning, the NRC team frca King of Prussia arrived on the scene mid-day Wednesday and briefed the Lt. Governor Wednesday night on their findings. There was a tall thin fellow and a short stocky gentlemen. And then there was a subsequent press conference Wednesday night and another mid-day Thursday morning. And what they were saying in substance was things are going along well, the plant is responding in a professional way and things are going good.
Gerusky And we should see no more radioactivity in the environment shortly. Then Friday morning came, where it was not anticipated. That was a point more than what the radiation levels were was that it wasn't anticipated, that they would increase even slightly. We expected it to go down and down.
. Gaut These two gentlemen probably would have been Higgins and Gallina.
Williamson We called them and referred to them as Mutt and Jeff.
Gaut Let my amplify now on a couple of these things which we may and tie it off so we can come to a conclution.
In terms of what w would rather have done or rather have happened, if we could have an ideal situation, let's go backwards.
We've got public information a little bit here, so let's tie that right in and go right at it. Had we had another way to go in public information, what would we have done to improve the situation, in very brief terres?
Williamson
~
No press releases from NRC Washington and Bethesda.
Molloy And notify the emergency personnel involyc..i before you talk to the public and news media.
Lamison Probably the whole team of an operations center in Washington where all Federal officials, appropriate Federal officials, would be to relay the information to PEMA rather than speaking from individual offices.
Gerusky One of the things that I'm concerned about now is that each of the reactors has a l
hot line direct to Bethesda and even though similar comments have been made by top level management in NRC that we cannot manage an accident from Washington, with the telephone lines they've got in Washington, it looks like that's what they are planning on doing, is managing the accident from Washington. And I'm very uptight
. about having it managed from Washington. NRL expects the commonwealth or any state to have an emergency plan and to carry out and that we are responsible for offsite consequences of a reactor accident. And then all at once we get a federal agency that does not have an emergency. plan, is not a partner to our emergency plan, telling us what we shousa be doing.
I'm afraid the same thing will happen again, maybe even quicker, with two open lines and no people onsite.
Again, what I'm concerned about is when NRC writes it's emergency plan, in their new one to handle this that they are going to be having the NRC Connissioners, most of who don't know anything about radiation, making decisions for the State people. Those decisions may not be based upon the proper information.
4 Gaut Any other comments on what should have been or shouldn't have been? Let's back up to -- we slopped over into accident assessment, exposure control and protec-tive response there a little bit. But, in the general area of accident assessment, now, anything we feel we should have done or wanted to do that we did not do?
Henderson Well, one thing fits into here that I would like to see is the NRC develop the onsite chain of communications to where - do not receive either you or us or anyone else - a host of calls that we don't know what level is making the call and whether its the shift supervisor or whether its the garbage collector. There should be a specific chain of communications within the plant structure itself to where recommendations coming out of there or advice or information coming out of there comes out from the spokesperson or the authority rather than just any subsequent level. We don't know here what the relationship between a shift supervisor is and some other party.
Gaut In other words, you're saying you find it difficult to place an independent assess-
'5
. ment on the thing because you don't know the quality or the source of the information you are receiving?
Henderson That's right.
Williamson I
This problem would:be reduced or eliminated if the procedure were followed to the letter. We wouldn't have any contact with the plant other than initial notifica-tion. From that point on, contact with the plant would be with radiation protec-tion, who are generally more f amiliar with the structure of the plant organiza-tion and more f amiliar with the organizations, or individuals, actual individuals.
Gerusky One of the things that this accident is probably.f. well, it's different, it was a different kind of accident than ones planned for When planning for a reactor accident, you make the assumption that things have gone wrong and we have to thke action, and that the action reconinended is taken and then you start-evaluating whether or not you did the right thing. Because things happen f ast, we assume.
They don't. And in this accident it took three days for it to happen, where things built up to a point where problems occurred. And the plan is useless at that point except for the notifications. That's the only thing that's still good.
And the levels of radiation, the exposure criteria. The only two things that are still good in the plan.,
The rest of it you can throw out because it's not the same kind of an accident.
It is assumed all the way along that the people who are involved with emergency planning and reacting to emergencies are the ones who are handiing the accident. Once the accident. goes on for three or four days.. it goes on for three or four hours, it gets out of the hands of the people wno routinely handle emergencies and up the chain of command to the Governor. And up
the chain of command to the NRC Commissioners, and the President. And decisions are made by people who are not knowledgeable in the emergency planning procedures and th9y are taken, I think in Pennsylvania the decisions were properly made because the advise was sought from the people who did know, before a decision was i.ade.
And it had to properly go up to the Governor by the third day.
There was a question at the Federal level if it had to go up to the President.
Gaut In other words you are saying that the level in which the accident would be handled or reacted to is unproportional to the time...
Gerusky When we called Civil Defense saying we've got to evacuate York County, that area of York County, the procedures were rolling, and no one except the people who were involved in the planning were involved.[ater when there was no problem, and it came later and it went up and up and up on Friday, I'm surprised the United Nations weren't involved. They may have been. I don't know.
Gaut I think that's an excellent point.
Williamson We're geared to do all this in the middle of the night, you know, when nobody else is around. And when these circumstances aren't prevailing, then things start to spin off and additional aut hority is laid on.
Gaut I think this is going to be highlighted when we get to the session on command l.
and control.
I want to get the interf ace too.
From the technical point of view, before we loose the representative from Health and Tom, I guess you are l
. going to have leave.
Is there anything else that should be covered at this point in terms of either recomendations for betterment or things we lef t out in areas of f act and protective response and evaluation, and so on?
Gerusky One thing I want to say that's the tremendous job the Department of Energy emergency people did.
I want to get that on the tape. Without them we would have real problems evaluating exposures, evaluating radiation levels. The helicopter assistance plus the teams. They were out, workir,g 12-14 hours a day and round the clock. But they were en 12 haur shif ts and without then we would have a serious problem in evalsating what was going on with the environment. We didn't have a staff to handle it. Now we anticipated that in our plan, but we anticipated their participation. We didn't anticipate the level of participation, and it was tremendous. They just poured in p'eople and equipment and gave everything they had to handle the emergency.
Henderson You're speaking about their f acilities at the Capito; l.y Airport. Joe Deal told me sonething that has no real significance to TMI, but if there had been a secono incident within the United States, they could not have supported both l
of them. That we had prar.tically 100% of their total effort resources in the way of communications, gear and equipment. And something that we always have to do, look over our shoulder when we are supporting a flood or any other natural l
disaster that we got to keep resources for a second one or a third one that might occur.
. Gerusky One of our problems now is that THI is taking most of our lab
- time and all of our environmental monitoring programs that are around the other reactor sites in Pennsylvania are not being handled as well as they should be. And, so as the accident at TMI winds down or goes back up again once they start processing water, opening up the containment and heading into the reactor vessel, we're going to have to devote more and more time to Three Mile Island and less time to other reactor sites in Pennsylvania, and that could cause problems too. And Im sure NRC has the same problem with the staff they've got there. Everything else has been de layed. But we can't go on for two years and not worry about the other reactors.
We've got problems with people'.
Henderson One of our difficulties with this agency here came dariag this entire exercise that we were unable to get an evaluation of what possible circumstances might occur and what kinds of meantimes for planning and what kinds of actions we.
might have to take. Now one of the problems which wts brought up here was that we had a lack of communication. We also... and I personally made a special request to the mgional director of NRC,who was at that time working with FDAA, k was noncomittal at the time, however, he did take notes and said that he would get back to us. Now that was on probably Sunday. Sunday afternoon. With all of I
the Federal agencies represented and we sat down in the end room down here and I laid out on him exactly what I needed in order to get word out to my counties so that they could be prepared.
I'm still waiting for that information.
I l
still haven't gotten it.
. Gerusky Excuse me, I think you got it from us a couple of weeks ago, because tiRC had prepared documents and it was handed out only to a few people and it wasn't handed out... I didn't even know it existed until Sunday and Sunday I saw it for the first time.
It was made available on Saturday to the site. And included lead times and the types of problems that could occur, how long it would take and so forth and I believe I sent it over to you last week or the week before that.
Henderson I got it on the 24th of June..
Gerusky Right, and you know the communications between the f4RC and PEMA were bad.
Henderson But if I had had this single sheet of paper... and could put that out to my Count 9 Civil Defense Directors. That was the only thing that we really needed to do, the planning that we needed to do at that time.
Gerusky Interestingly enough, there was no emergency in that,no evacuation was required anything greater than 10 miles, ind in most cases it was 5 miles or less with take cover up to 10.
Gaut Can you identify that document for the record?
m
. Gerusky I can give you a copy.
In f act, I've got a copy back in my...
Henderson This was a letter reportedly from the Lt. Governor, the Lt. Governor passed to ne since this time that I received it from you, that Chairman Hendrie himself passed it out in the Governor's office.
It was an assessment of the kinds of incidents that might occur and what the results of those incidents would be and the kind of lead times associated with each one of these incidents. The only thing the Lt. Governor passed on to me was they felt at the time it was too complicated to pass it out to us.
Gerusky I thought you had.
I didn't realize you didn't have it.
I couldn't understand why everybody was planning evacuations up to 20 miles.
I wasn't involved in the evacuation planning.
I wasn't involved at all. And apparently that information wasn't used.
Henderson Harold Denton personally informed the Governor at 8:30 Friday night, 8:00 to 8:30 Friday night, that it would be prudent on the part of the Commonwealth to prepare evacuation plans out to 20 miles. Andhe made that a public announcement later that evening. As a consequence, we had no choice at that time, not only to plan out to 20, but we couldn't do anything less than 20. The public's perception of what could happen and what might happen had already raised to that standard.
Gerusky Then on Saturday we get the document that says no planning beyond 10.
. Henderson Of course, we never saw that document.
Gerusky And Denton never retracted the statement either.
Williamson We went through the better part of two weeks with nothing better than 2 to 8 hour9.259259e-5 days <br />0.00222 hours <br />1.322751e-5 weeks <br />3.044e-6 months <br /> time frame.
Henderson And we made that up ourselves:
Gerusky Well, I don't know how accurate the NRC document was. Who prepared it or anything.
All we knew is that it came This is what their best estimates were on what could haopen and what kind of protective measure should be taken.
I believe it was telecopied to the site on Saturday.
It's to Hendrie at the site.
Different Speaker (?)
Was that an individual analyses fbr that site, or is it a general...
Henderson It was for that site. Under the circumstances that were evident at the time it gave 3 or 4.different kinds of things...
It was dated 1 April.
. Gaut Let me ask a specific question here that I think bears on the Department of Health and that was the relocation centers in Hershey before you get away from us, Mr. Welch. Were there problems associated with that that should be surfaced here.
Welch We had no problem on the relocation centers, of course they are picked out by PEMA.
Henderson Kevin Molloy, the county selected it.
Initially we had about three relocation sites, one by accident in York and the other one was planned in York. And then subsequently then Kevin established the one in Hershey. And then subsequently the people from York relocated to' Hershey. So we had the single site. The only problem with that site there it is a commercial type of a site and this did effect their ongoing program of profit making and they were eager to close it out as rapidly as possible, although they were most gracious in making it available and in taking care of the people that were there. We couldn't have had a better site as f ar as Hershy (HERC0) supply and the Red Cross support of it during the entire operation.
Williamson An amusement park for the kids...
Gerusky l
In retrospect too, on the evacuation of pregnant women and small children, the recommendation by NRC that it should be carried out was based on the f act that
7
. they didn't know what was going to happen next.
By that time all the significant radiation exposure had occurred to people within the area. From that point on it was a day-by-day proposition as to wfiether or not it was acted on. NRC kept saying wil we don't have anything solid to base a recommendation on to allow them back in. There is no break-point, the reactor is not in cold shutdown. We think we will be in cold shutdown shortly. When we get the cold shutdown, let's bring them back. Well, cold shutdown has never occurred. And one point along the way, we said to them, people have been out there for 11 days now, it's getting to be ridiculous, when there is no exposure in the area and you people say in effect to us that there is no problem to bring them back in, but for PR purposes you've got to have a break-point. And so' we recommended that you get together something to let the people back in. And so with Hendrie and Denton, they got together four or fiie points that were happening that they could use as a break-point.
Now they can tell the Governor, okay it's all right to bring them back in. Now it was probably a mistake to tell them to leave in the first place.
In retrospect it was a mistake, I don't think it was at the time.
But to bring them back in was a real problem. Because there was no criteria to let them leave. You've got to have criteria before you recommend an action and if you don't have any criteria than you have no criteria to bring them back. And there was a real problem in trying to get these. people back. And to have NRC say its okay to come back.
Henderson We almost had to manuf acture an incident, or perhaps we did, or a breakpoint to 2
permit them back in.
Gerusky We had to keep pushing them to try to say bring them back. They were really concerned.
It was a problem, 1
. Welch I would like to add before I go, on KI. We did play this low key. People did not know it was coming in and not until Monday when Calif ano sent his message to Carter that the workers should take it and it should be issued did w realize we had a problem. We did have plans drawn up to prepositionthis to cover an emergency evacuation with no warning and an orderly evacuation. When Calif ano appeared before the Kennedy Committee en Monday, and this became well known, of course the reporters were calling us and why were we refusing to obey an orde of the President.
And this is where we started to get a credibility gap. By this time people in the area found out that this KI was available and... or was in the area, and we started to get rumors that the'y were prepared to break in the esrehouse to get it simply because it was not available in tne first place, and it was on hand and they thought they needed it. And since Secretary Calif ano advised that it be issued to the population. Well, first of all it didn't arrive when we really would have neeied it. Say we have radioactive iodine at that time.
So as a consequence we had to put armed guards on it. That might be taken into consideration trying to keep,
Gerusky It was interesting, we have been attempting, pre-TMI, to get KI into Pennsylvania before to stockpile it. We had been talking with the Department of Health, the j
previous Secretary of Health about getting KI and we couldn't get KI because of the expense. And appamntly now it'.s going to take us quite a while and will be stockpiled in Washingtor and made available.
I'm not sure that's the way to 90.
KI decision has to be... KI's got to te out where the problems are, not in l
l Washington, stockpiled to be sent someplcce.
Welch Well, the quality control in this shipment, we're not so sure anyway.
Henderson Is this also available in tablet form?
Welch No, in Europe it is. Most of the western military powers have it in tablet form.
Evidently, the Defense Departaent has not manuf actured it here in the United St ates. We found out that the recommended dose for wartime is one tablet, which is 50 milligrams a day. And our scientists determined 130 milligrams for this inc ident. Although we ended dp, because of the number of bottles ard the droppers were not even, we figured two drops or 65 milligrams a day would be sufficient for 10 days. But they are prepared to pick it up and I think they are going io store it in a central area in case it would be available or in the event of another a:cident in the United States.
Dr. Rodcall, would you stay for this afternoon?
Dr. Rodcall:
Yes, sir.
Welch Dr. Rodcall was the liaison with DOE Gaut I think at this point if we could switch over... I don't know what you're break times are here, I would like to cover yet the two areas of evacuation and'. traffic a control as to what you preceived when the announcement went out on the evacuation of the special cases. And, if we could extrapolate on that, anything what would
. have done and had you had a heavier evacuation might be useful. And then the command control put together in one cover. So perhaps it might be well to cover traffic control and evacuation before the break, and then come back after the break, finish off with command control in the overall sense.
(Gerusky leaving, decision to cover command and control now). Where did the control imminate from, and where did it emminate to and where were the weak spots as you preceived them that you would have liaa otherwise?
Henderson Well, I think that Tom hit:the problem on the head a little earlier when we started talking about the timgs involved.
Initially on Wednesday morning there was no question the command control was the Lt. Governor, who is the Chairman of PEMA and this agency. As the incident period increased over time, and the problems with the public information became more and more pronounced, the Governor became more heavily " involved and then finally totally involved. At that time, the chain actually switched totally to the Governor's office and he became the focal point between the White House and flRC and this agency and the public. And that was basically the channel of the chain of comand.
Gerusky And I don't think it would happen any differently, no matter what we would reconnend, because that's the responsibility of the Governor. He has ultimate responsibility for any action taken by the people under his direction and I think it was handled very well. With the exception of some problems with communication during and after.
l l
-6 3-Well, w couldn't all know everything that was going on.
There was too much going on. And we didn't nedd to be involved in evacuation planning. As a result, we didn't know what was going on, because we had our hands full with adjusted radiation levels keeping up to date on what was going on at the plant.
I think that the separation was good,.and it.was needed.
I was a little concerned about the number of Federal people who were in from the variety of agencies who were directing or assisting in directing what was going on at a later date because I wasn't sure why they were there or what real responsibility they had.
Henderson I don't think we can f ault that through. They wre brought in not to play a part in the incident as it was going on, but to prepare. in the event higher level of protective action had become necessary. And we had some 26 Federal agency representatives in here who we met with daily and all we did...
These people were all told by the head man, who was Adamcik, that (end of tape)
(beginning of tape):
Williamson:
Before we leave the discussion of command and control it ought to be pointed the current administration in terms of having been in office two months when this began, and this had a definite:sffect on how it progressed over a period cf time.
Particularly the longer this went the more that was obvious.
It made a difference in the coordination of the Connonwealth response.
U
. Henderson I think the only. problem, and we've already hit on that, under this kind of a system was our inability to get word out to the counties concerning what was taking place and what did we anticipate prior to a press conference. They were all, I think all counties here admit this, that they heard many times for the first time over the radio. And had to listen to the radio to find out what the heck was going on.
Molloy That was part of the problem. We were so darn busy in many cases we didn't have a chance to listen to the radio.
In any emergency situation we always had a chain of command.
It's basically local, county, state and federal.
It's that simple. The information flows up and down that way. Of course the systems go up and down that way and so forth. And this accident there could have been no real difference with the exception you had your local boss, county and state and off to the side you really had, at TMI, okay the TMI and the NRC, fine, and they should have gone right toto the state and the information runs either way.
What happened was that the two lower blocks which was the county and locals were pushed way down here and two new blocks were inserted. And one was the news media, and the other was the public. And we had this collapse in the chain of command.
If we didn't get a change to listen to the radio we :,new something new came out. Every ' hour on the hour the citizens started calling. We just j
heard about this bubble, we just heard about this. We had to start calling PEMA and say, ' hey what about it. And in many cases they said we'll get back to you and that just created more headaches and more problems.
If everybody just l
1 l
followed their chain of command, so much would have been avoided.
. Henderson I think part of this was brought about by a statement that Craig made earlier about the newness of the administration, and I think that the administration felt that we already had the channel of command and that we were getting the kind of information we needed. And I don't believe... and certainly I spoke to this several times, but I was unable to get across to them that we weren't getting this information and we couldn't even find out when the press conferences were taking place. So it was only accidental that we heard that,. hey there's a press conference on and I'd run back to a radio back here and try to listen to the last half of it to find out what decisions were being made. And I think we've gotten that thrashed out as a lesson that we've learned.
It was inexcusable.
Gerusky Well, I don't think anybody knew when the press conferences were going to take place. They took place after the briefing was over in the Governor's office and I thought he would say. That coald have taken two or three hours or it could have taken 15 minutes.
Henderson Yeah, but that was Saturday. This agency didn't even know when those conferences were being held in the Governor's office. So, as a consequence, we had no real time whatsoever as to put people on a radio and start listening. We shouldn't have to listen to the radio to get it. And I think we've already ironed this out, that we didn't have this comunications. When my people couldn't get to your office on one or two occasions, I called direct.
I couldn't get you, Dornsife, or l
Maggie and somebody else answered the phone... What's going on, and the answer I
always came back - no change. And that's just excactly what... We started putting j
i I
-6 6-out situation sheets, and we started putting them our every two hours and the only things we could put in that situation report was the weather situation and no change as f ar as TMI is concerned. And we did that for two days and then said the hell with that. All we're doing to tying up the teletypewriter time.
Gerusky One of the other things that occurred is that the NRC put out PN0's routinely.
We didn't know about it for a week and a half. And we werent' even given copies of them until somebody mentioned -- John Villforth, on the phone mentioned --
hey, I saw this PNL that this is going on and I said, what's a PN07 From that point on we started getting copies and you started getting copies.
Henderson That was the 4th of April. We got out first copy and somebody handed that to me and said don't dicinenate. this.
And when I read the damn thing we immediately put that out on our teletypewriter. Then we called the NRC and we started getting it.
Doc Collins started sending it to us over the telecopier a day late.
Initially, a day later, and then we started catching up in the time and before the incident was over about 30 days later w were getting them within two or three hours.
Gerusky The public had copies.. the press had copies of these PN0's from the first one, from Washington. So that was rediculous not to give out the information.
Henderson But I think FDAA had...
Gerusky They didn't have the authority to release it.
. Henderson That's right. And they had been told very specifically from the White House itself that, hey, there's only two spokesmen. The Governor on the one hand and Harold Denton on the other, so they were not about to renig on that direction that they had.
So I did not intend Elsasser These were being handed out to the media the day they wre... at the Press Center in Middletown. And for them not to be available over,12 miles away, or not teletyped or somehow send them over to you people is kind of sad. There was no mystique or mystery or anything Gerusky Yeah, but its just a point torremember the next time it happens if somethings coming out of Washington involved in what's going on in the state, let the state know. As a matter of fact, some of the Regional Offices of NRC sent them out to the states in their regions.
I think Atlanta region was sending them out to their regions and they were getting them before we were. So I know that everybody was all... that there was all kinds of ccnfusion. That kind of information was really needed. We just could not go to the press conferences to find out what was going on. We would turn on the radio and try to listen to it in between telephone calls.
Gaut In the area of command contr61 in the other agencies that are members of this group, the counties, the Bureau, PEMA, any questions?
l l
-6 8-Evans As was centioned before that as f ar as TMI, we have a hostile action responsibility, w do have a two-mile evacuation plan. On Saturday 31, March t
1979 at 11:45 Evacuation plan doordination between counties coordination traffic control (remainder inaudible) l l
i
-6 9 -
Henderson Let me back up then on the evacuation. As f ar as the incident we had evacuation plans for the three counties of Yock, Lancaster and Dauphin for protective action out to 5 miles. Under those schemes each county could take care of any evacuees within the county. ~So the plan was strictly county oriented. When the scheme on Friday morning extended out to 10 miles it increased the number to two
. additional counties, Lebanon and Cunterland. How we had five counties involved.-
Again, for the most part, the counties could take care of their own evacuation cr own evacuees within that area, with some minor exceptions.. Late on Friday night when we got word that we should plan out to 20 miles, this added one additional county, Perry County, which made it now six counties. And very few of the counties could take care of the evacuees in their own counties.. So we had to draft out rather hastily the major networks, giving them priorities to the counties with Cumberland heading west, and York heading south, Lancaster and Lebanon heading to the east and Dapuhin County to the north.
So it would be very minor crossage, if any, from one county into another. And involving some 30 additional counties as host areas.
It was at this time too, that the Department of Military Affairs began assigning battalions or designating battalions to support the risk counties and getting their guard battalion comanders down' working with the counties. in developing further refining their evacuation plans. Once we identified these major road net-words, we sent down to each of the six counties, a representative from this office to work with them in refining their plans and also had DCPA, Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, provide us two additional people for each county to go in and assist the counties in developing what then became a major kind of evacuation.
One of the problems probably was that we did not get this road network out as early as we could.
It was maybe noon on Saturday before it had gotten down to all of the counties. The five mile evacuation plan had no semblence to whz; we
Molloy Well, the counties were working through Penn. 00T in many cases, so if there was no coordination it was between Penn 00T and the counties themselves.
Mostly the county plan was strictly within the county itself.
Henderson We were working with the Turnpike also so it may be the word was not getting down to the right kinds Of people. The Turnpike Commissioner designated Jim Wilson to be the spokesman for the Turnpike Commission, so we were working with Jim Wilson of the Turnpike.
Different Speaker (?)
but your people in here, I believe Evans Well, this is how we discovered it. When we were checking these plans we found out that some had anticipated diosing the turnpike and using it strictly for westbound traffic. And we discovered this and found it to be a flaw.
.l ?
Diff erent Speaker (?)
Well, of course, that's what you were sent down there to do. Find out whether these plans were adequate and whether they were ambiguous or not because the county had the basic planning responsibility. Our's was assistance to the state from the state and coordination.
Suter I think what he's trying to point out is the plan would work for five miles, it would probably work for 10, but when you hit 20, our highways couldn't handle r
1
. it. So the State Police and our people worked together and did work it out.
But without those two getting together, it would never havewor ked.
Henderson Well, that's why we called your expert on transportation and the Penn. 00T move-ment people together in here to go down to visit all the counties and make certain there were no bugs in the plan. '
Ev ans We were never aware of the 5 to 10 mile plan. We were not called in.
Suter I think the problem was each county took care of its own.
Ev ans About 11:45 on Saturday, the 31st, this is the first we were called in on any evacuation plan, other than what we had on 2 miles.
Suter Like I said before, earlier, 5 mile radius is no prob'.. Each county took care j
of themselves, but like he pointed out in Dauphin County, when you add over 10 miles you're in trouble because you don't have a sufficient amount of roads, you can't close and make them one way, because we have to rrake room for things coming in like the state police said, coming in from all over...
We couldn't allow you to make it a :one-way. And it was not coordinated until, my records say probably Sunday, when we got with the State Police and we did gcout to the counties and got it resolved. But I think the thing was you had three plans and people didn't realize that plan one would only work for 5 miles, plan 2 for ten miles and neither one for 20 miles.
1
. Lamison They hadn't really progressed ot the stage of planning in a 10-mile area. Where it became essential for very close coordination of these aff airs before they launched into 20 mile plan. And that's when they got involved. So there was a lapse of time in there as they progressed from the 10 to the 20, and it then became essential that we do effect coordination and that was done about 11:00 Saturday morning when we asked Penn. 00T and State Police to provide representatives to each county for that particular purpose, to advise them of traffic control, road conditions capabilities and so on and so forth.
Logsdon Did you have any plans to how you would keep gas stations open if everybody else ev acuated?
Henderson We prelocated as part of the plan emergency tankers.
Carroll We haa plans to patrol the roads with tankers just for that eventuality.
Henderson But we also had all the filling stations on these major roads topped off through the Governor's Energy Council said that they had adequate gas to supply the public if we...
l Carroll l
We also had wntekers available to pull them on the road.
a Gaut I
This is one of the functions of the National Guard?
. Carroll This was hard.
I can't contribute anything in the way of actual events. Our major portion was planning. But as f ar. as evacuation is concerned, w had evacuation plans to include filling of all these roads with both wreckers and gasoline tankers. Our problem came in one that w were concerned with was in the event of evacuation our mission was to go in and secure the area.
And w were concerned about levels of radiation. We were not confident that we would have that kind of information available to us as to what the actual levels people would experience in the area, once it had been evacuated. So this was one of the concerns we had. We have no problems with command and control, although sitting in on meetings in the Governor's office all those meetings with the press, we detected a lack of confidence on the part of the National people in the states authority to handle the situation. And we saw a lack of confidence on the part of the state as f ar as the counties being able to handle the situation. And I think this contributed to some of the things that happened.
It was a definite lack of confidence to handle the situation.
Lamison You sensed that lack of confidence on the part of the county...?
Carroll Not at PEMA.
I sensed it with the Governor and Lt. Governor... Because they were not f amiliar with their capabilities and what their responsibilities were.
And I think it delayed some important decisions.-
1 Molloy That's perhaps when they should have established contact with the counties to get our input.
. Carroll Right, this I definately feel that some decision that should have been made were delay!d because they did not have confidence in the counties.
Gaut At this point, I think it would be appropriate if any of the other state or county people have points which have not been covered then I'd like to refer to my associates here to see if there is anything they would like to speak.
Furrer I am not sp'eaking specifically in Agriculture's area of duty. Mr. Molloy brought out a point in the command ctfain, we're missing the public.
i That's the bottom end of this thing, that's the finals. And they didn't get the kind of information they thought they needed and plagued me with calls and you with calls. And that's part of the real problem we talked about.
The other thing is they're uncomfortable because they just don't have the informa-tion, the Army addressed the f act that he had problems in putting out the readings.
They changed so rapidly from what he was.,getting and what was occurring out there at the nuclear station that he was uncomfortable with it because it would change It is possible to put this kind of data on some kind of map that the National Guard could have, the public could have, that everybody could have and the possibility existed the map would change in a couple of hours, an hour, or 15 minutes. But nevertheless, they will be better informed than they were with the way we did M.
Readings all over the place. And I cite a specific example of the tu h.mding on the wall (Sky Lab Track), we're all comfortable witt, ti n.,
e
. Henderson It better be downrfight now.
(Sky Lab).
s Furrer If that was possible some way to get it on some kind of a board. We were very fortunate in this incident we didn't have severe radiation. His National Guard people I could be driving in it doing things they thought had to be done. My Agriculture people could be going in there for samples, any number of people.
The f armer with the cows and the hogs and the chickens. He gets out if we tell him to. But he goes back cause he's got $100,000 sitting there and its got to be fed, its got to be watered, its got to be milked.
Gaut I forge? one point and I want to direct it to you, I apoligize for overlooking i
it. Food control. Would you share with us briefly the food control situation which was referred to and what was happening, whether there were people in...
i 1
Furrer We're first of all, we participated with DER collecting milk samples. We did the sampling of forage in the pasture areas for livestock and that sort of thing. We rely on DER in our laboratory's in our f acilities We have no agricultural capability to determine what the radiation is in those.
When it comes to protection we are with DER again when you talk about forage and foods and we're with the Health Department when you talk about water and food. We do have that kind of information. The federal government would be putting out for years about what you can and can't do with things in sealed l
containers. Now we had that data ready for release through PdMT, to the public i
i if it were asked for or we had a need for it. We also set up a backup system in l
. case we evacuated where anyone of these evacuations or mass care centers were getting short on food supplies, we could advise where those supplies might be and the quantity to meet their requirements.
We had this kind of data as part of our routine of inspection of foods. We share this fully responsibility with DER and Emergency Preparedne ss.
Gaut Were there any provisions made or was anything done in preparation of interrupting food chains, such as milk pathways?
Furrer This is a kind of a problem that touches on this and on the things that occur when people became somewhat frightened.
It also touches on the economic aspects of
- this, the f armer has a bulk tank and it will probabry contain three or four milkings of his herd and then it has to be picked up.
If the processor is worried about his reputation or his product, he won't go in there and pick that up or if he does he won't want to include it in his regular milk. We encountered some of those and even though the radiation levels were...
didn't support dumping or anything like that, or even considering dumping, we were depending upon the readings and the test results werwere getting before we were advised them. We were also prepared to the extent possible to get reports on how much of this was actually contaminated and the quantity that had been. As near as we could find out working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there's no indemnity the f armer could get if he dumped his milk and it had not been determined to be contaminated. This is an area that j
i j
needs attention. When his tank is full he has to do something with the milk.
. He has suffered a loss. And yet his milk may not be contaminated to the point where he is There is another aspect of it, again economic, and that is that the better prices are paid for milk that goes into containers and is consumed as milk and if its processed for dried milk or for cheese ;r some of those things, the f armer gets a smaller amount of money for_it. So, when they start having doubts about whether it can go into gallon containers and go on the shelf they put it over in the other area and he takes a small loss there. We were prepared to put out this kind of information and develop data on it and send it down to show their losses. We didn't really get involved in that because our milk wasn't that bad. We did find some milk was diverted from the usual uses*to processing.
Gaut Were there any other food around Three Mile Island which you were planning for?
Furrer Wellm milk, of course, is the one that really comes to mind. We didn't really get involved in meat, although we were talking to a Dr. Horn, U.S.D.A.
Dr. Horn, as near as I can determine, on his own, closed down a meat packager, for a period of time and then opened them up again. But he is the one that has to do the inspection right at the plant. He took it as a precaution.
l Williamson This was in March crops were not a big consideration and they weren't harvesting much. And cattle were being fed indoor ~s too.
Furrer As one of our initial precautions, we advised all the people with livestock
. to bring their livestock indoors and feed them with feeds that were protected, rather than leave them in the pasture.
Gaut Does anybody else...
Blosser Yes, sir, my name ti Tom Blosser, Cumberland County.
There's one area has to be i.ddressed, that's the county perspective and the c unty perspective my itself.
Its one idea to address the state in this function its different identities as f ar as Commonwealth government.
I think there's lessons to be learned as f ar as your interest at the county level. We had to do what everyone else was telling us to do, whether it be at the Federal level or the state level. We're the ones that actually have to do it all.
Back on the comunciations side, primarily I think the testimony here this morning were really a matter of comunications and coordination.
I might suggest that this might be a very good time to address the comunications across the board for all the 70-some reactors that are on line in the United States and all the 'ther ones that are supposedly going to be on line so there c
has to be this direct communications channel whether it be from reactors itself to the commonwealth down to the county, as Col. Henderson alluded to, primarily the six counties that became involved then expand out to 30 some counties. So you're talking in Pennsylvania - Shippingport, Three Mile Island, Peach Bottom and Limerick shortly, and the other one up the river.
But you can see it pretty much encompasses all the counties within a followup aspect, so I would suggest that primarily communications probably is your highest priority at this particular point in time as f ar as the credibility f actor, the f act that we have to get down to where its really at, the people that really have to do it all.
Gaut Thank you. A good point.
I think communications is the key stone to all of this. Anything else?
Lamison One area that needs to be add'ressed is the never-ending aspect of pre-TMI plan is the demand for or availability of instrumentation. As you well.know, all DCPA required instrumentation granted to the state is primarily intended for another purpose, mainly survival.
Yet, terrific demands are generated, great volumes of equipment asked for, request and approved for all the Federal agencies that were in here, the state agencies including Military Affairs, the National Guard, the State Police, the counties, not only the counties in the affected area, but instrumentation required for certain host counties, or ir, the case of Lancaster, for example, the counties that are lined up as mainly support lines, primarily the rescue or anbulance personnel. But, in-addition to that, tremendous requests outside the area for.information and instrumentation by individual citizens. As you recall, back in the early 60's a great volume of instruments required, I think they can be effectively utilized in certain categories, start checking the availability of commercial resources in Pennsylvania, we find, in essence, a great many of the corporations who use to be in the program back in the early 60's vying for an l
l t
. NOCD contracts. About all you have left now is Victorine in Ohio and United Nuclear, but they import everything from England.
In that category, with respect to the counties, most of the things that their fire companies and whatnot requested in their service is instrumentation already provided through the OCD program aspects of it.
One interesting thing to me is that all the NRC people who had 300 of our 742 dosimeters, is why did they want the 742, why not the 1387 I don't want to know the first time on the dosimeter, the first thing I can read on a 742 is 1 rem 1
l which is 1,00C millirem. On 138 its effective utilization.
Now in the category we had to go to DCPA and come up with 2 shipments from Richmond, EGSC twice 5,000138's in one case and I've forgotten how many in the other. Just to come up with support requirements placed upon us that we wouldn't have had.
For example Carroll Non of our dosimeters came below one rem.
Lamison(?)
That's true because you know the 138 was basically used as a training dosimeter.
But the whole point is that you examine a commercial inventory and what they had was comparable and compatible with the 138. They don't have anything any better, and they're going to charge
$70-100 for each one.
l
. Henderson I think another problem that should be highlightep if we'd 11ad Wednesday and thursday and even Friday to have further refined and developed a 5 mile -
evacuatiod plan:1 think we could have executed {it with a reasonable degree of success.
I think we could have limited alot of the public concern.
I think the public concern was aroused when we started talking about 10 and then 20 miles, and then 25 miles and all this other thing.
I think it comes down to a basic lesson ht:te. What we need is for each individual plant within the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania probably across the nation, a detailed hazardous analysis taking into consideration the weather conditions around that plant and the terrain around that plant ratiier than just coming up with a round circle of 5 miles, 10 miles or 20 miles.
I think that you people have the expertise that you can do such a hazard analysis, and we consequently can do a better job of planning for a specific kind of a hazard instead of just lumping everything into a 5 or 10 mile plan.
I think if a true hazard analysis was conducted we wouldn't have had to worry about 15 hospitals. We may have been able to limit it to 5 hospitals.
In the 10 mile area, as I recall there were only a couple of hospitals, but right across the line at 10.5 miles or something just across that border, there are 4 or 5 other hsopitals. When you start talking about 10 miles, those hositals basically f all within that 10 mile area.
If we had had a hazard i
analysis based upon the prevailing wind conditions,'the weather conditions, l
l based upon the geography of the area, I suspect that we would have been able to refine our area into a somewhat smaller area, and consequencely focused our attention on the real problem rather than just suddenly 636 or 750,000, whatever the magic number might be, of people we had to evacuate.
I think this is a very necessary requirement the NRC ought to be with the plant's even right now and coming up with a kind of hazard analysis that planners can then take it and do.something about.
. Gaut I think the basic reason behind the general guidance is that the accidents can vary. so much from one point to another there is going to be confusion, but I see your point.
Henderson Well, Three Mile Island is a good example as far as reading the safety analysis that'c with the Three Mile plant.
If we were planning out to two miles or 3117 meters, as I rccall is in the document, we would have met the NRC requirements as far as the safety... The LPZ was defined as 3117 meters around Three Mile Island. So basically, that was the area that we would have conducted any evacua-tion.
I think this instance brings out that that LPZ is probably a little bit small.
Williamson At least the question, is it?
In Pennsylvania's planning associated with nuclear sites we went out to 5 miles which gave us quite a bit of a contigency. And we were talking about 26,000 people, approximately with TMI. Then, when we %ent out to 20 all of a sudden we went up to 700,000 people which included the cities of Harrisburg and York. With the 5 mile limitation we have no hospitals and two nursing homes, out to 20 milr.s, we have 13 hospitals and 50 some nursing homes and a penitentary and mental nospitals, and alot of those things, if it isn't necessary to consider that f ind... the hazard analysis is going to determine this. Then it's a tretrandous mistake to include them in the plan.
Henderson In the midst of the crisis is no time to start from scratch for planning. And I think we can learn from this and get now something that we can get out to the public in advance on and say okay this is the area. And it doesn't necessarily l
have to be a round circle (end of tape)
=
(beginning of tape):
Henderson
... and that's no way to run a railroad.
Different Speaker (?)
.MS.
There was absolutely no relationship to the existing licensing requirements, the rules and regulations of NRC or the plant in relation to what the NRC or other Federal guidance states and the planning circle was 5,10 or 20. Also, one of the things that happened as a result of this, a recommendation by the Governor for pregnant women and children within a 5 mile radius. What it did within a 10 mile radius not in that category. Two cases in. point, Holy Spirit Hospital, which is about 10 miles away from TMI, I had to get my wife out of'here after 17 days.
Why? Because the staff was leaving. Down at Fry Village in Middletown, also evacuate my 90 yar old f ather because of health Dauphin County didn't lay it on Fry Village to close Fry Village, but management had to do it because of the conditions created.
Molloy Talking of proble.ns at Fry Village (remainder inarJible) i e
. Different Sceaker (?)
They couldn't separate the categories those that had to be evacuated by ambulance and those who were totally on their on8. There was no distinction between the two.
It was get out, period.
possibility of evacuating people that cculd be evacuated easily (remainder inaudible)
Willianson Alot of those things were resolved along the same line, it's cheaper to move than it is to protect them.
Its a funding problem.
Furrer The second aspect of what this gentlemen mentioned is that this appeared to have a time frame that would allow an evacuation. Now if the readings were so hazardous that eva;uation would be an extent of exposure then the shelter thing would have been, and I think that's the point.
We talked to a large number of f arners that if he elected to stay with his cattle things he should be doing for himself. Even if we had an l
l evacuation, some of these people would have elected to stay.
, Ernst As background information I have found this discussion extremely interesting.
I am sure that we will be getting back to most of you on an individual basis to ask specific questions. However, at this time I would like to ask for youc to send us a copy of any previous formal emergency plans, revised plans, suramaries of actions or chronologies (like the one that I note Major Evans has) or any formal "after action" reports that have been prepared regarding the TMI accident.
I do have a number of specific questions in my mind that arise as a result of this meeting, but I think these would take too much eine and it would thus not be appropriate to raise these questions at this time. However, these questions will be asked of you individually at a later time. I do wish to thank you for the opportunity of attending this session.
It has been a great held in furthering the understanding of the NRC/TMI Special Inquiry Group with regard to State and Local actions during the accident.
Gaut There's one point that didn't get raised and just occurred to ne, and I didn't mean to take it onto the end to make it sound out of proportion to what it is interaction with the State of Maryland or the State of New York or any adjacent states. Were there any problems which sould be highlighted in the record?
Henderson i
We were in daily contact with the Civil Defense Director of Maryland. He visited us. The only problem area we hac was the Governor of New York made the announce-l ment that we were evacuating millions of people up to New York. And we had a l
l hell of a time putting that to bed, it got out to the press.
If we had talked to the Governor of Pennsylvania which he had never talked to, but that went on for four or five days.
i
e
. Our relationship with Maryland was good, Maryland volunteered alot of help as f ar as our evacuation was concerned.
Crowe That was not only state coordination, by the way, but it was also county to county coordination that worked very adequately across state lines.
j Gaut Well, I think we have pretty well accomplished what we're looking for.
1 think we've got a very good flavor of what was happening here and I appreciate all the time that was spent in putting it together. We will, as soon as we get these tapes transcribed and we will send them right down to you and pass them out to whoever you think. Unless there are other areas you feel shouldilbe surf aced.
(End of Meeting - 12:36 p.m.)
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