ML20115F417
| ML20115F417 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Site: | Crane  |
| Issue date: | 11/15/1984 |
| From: | Cherry B GENERAL PUBLIC UTILITIES CORP. |
| To: | Dieckamp H GENERAL PUBLIC UTILITIES CORP. |
| References | |
| SP-I-TMIA-005, SP-I-TMIA-5, NUDOCS 8504190506 | |
| Download: ML20115F417 (4) | |
Text
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Date: March 29, 1979 Serw=m
- Subject TMI #2 Accident
- To:
MR. H. M. DIECKAMP Locatiort Parsippany This memo will summarize my observations as the events surrounding the Three Mile Island.#2 incident unfolded on March 28. There may be inaccuracies, due to the perspective from which I observed things in Parsippany.
There are two or three major observations which I should hit first. First, of the Service Corp. officers, only Graham and I were here initially. Murray arrived from.
D.C. around.1:00 pm.
Second, it was very difficult to obtain any reliable, hard
'information particularly during the early part of the day.
The only source of solid information was Bob Arnold and he understandably was extremely busy, and it was.very hard to get through to him by. telephone. Third, because of the absence of many key individuals, particularly in the Communicaciass area, there was sub-stantial difficulty in handling some of the inquiries.
I should note here that Rich Esteves did an outstanding job in handling hundreds -of inquiries in the first couple of hours, with very little information to deal with.
Let me now chronologically indicate what occurred here, and observe some of the Problems. In so doing, I should note that there is no attempt here to criticize the performance of anyone, but rather to attempt to improve our ability to react to serious situations and communicate those situations to the public.
I was first advised of the problem at Three Mi e Island at about 9:20 am by V.P.
Zodiaco, who had heard about it from somebody, who had heard about it on the I radio..I immediately tried to call Arnold; I couldn't get through to him.
called Sims who didn't know anything about it.
Sims contacted PJM who
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.the Communications area appraised him of what had occurred. -I then went over to and found that Esteves was the only one there. They were' being barraged witti telephone calls from wire services, newspapers, tv staticus, etc. They were just-then (about 9:30 am) getting a first report of what had happened from Bob Arnold.
I tried to work with Esteves to make some sense out of the information that e j
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h was gettdag.- At the same time, Rich was trying to communicate with the Met lEdT p*0ple to see what they were doing.
Fifteen or twenty minutes later, I cs11edJ Mr. Kuhns who had not been notified of what had happened.. By this' time,, I had.:
talked to Bob Arnold and gotten a first hand report from him of the event..
Observation....we should put in place a procedure which gets hard informationfout to key individuals as soon as possible, when events ofj this magnitude occur. ;Some of the early information that was released indicated a very low degree of. serious-ness to the accident.
I then went back to Rich Esteves and we got in communication with Met Eli who read l ;Li? A8%
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Thn Met Ed rnirasa wr cubstantially unden ying the-seriousness of the incident at that time (ct 1ccat tha tricarn w e cubs m -
- ially different fr6m the report which I had just received from Bob Arnold).
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Additionally, the interaction that Rich hed with the lower level Met Ed perro.L people was something of an adversary interaction where I felt that Elch was Mt'.
viewed as the enemy.
A few minutes later, John' Graham came over. He had been contacted by Liber =an and Kuhns regarding the inpact on the stock and what should be done vis-a-vis the Srock John and I then worked with Rich to try to draft a GPU news release....
Exchange.
comething which could be released to the various wire services and the Exchange.
In the meantime, there were literally hundreds of phone calls coming in that Rich was trying to deal with by himself.
Another observation is that we should consider what kinds of back-up should be pro-vided to the people in Communications because in thin situation it was clear that Rich was really on his own, and there was nobody else over there to really assist.
About this time., Ferrar indicated he had a call from the Lieutenant Governor's office which communicated unhappiness about the fact that various state officials had not been notified of the accident until around 7 am, or some three hours after the initiation cf the sequence at events. Had we known at that time that the alarms had not tripped until 7 am, we could have communicated back to the Governor's
office that this was the case and the notification, at least in our view, was timely, and perhaps mitigated some of the flah which occurred from the presumably late notification.
John Gcaham and I then spoke to Walter Creitz who was about to sign off on a news release from Met Ed.
The news release again was more or less consistent with the earlier version prepared by Met Ed and it, in our view, underplayed the seriousness We indicated this to Walter and he indicated that he would get of the event.
back to Bob Arao1d to get an update.
Another observation here is that appcrently the Met Ed headquarters guys were not completely up to speed on what was unfold-ing and, again, this I think reflects a need to improve the communication of hard This difficulty information in a consistent way to key individuals in the system.
in communication persisted, perhaps not surprisingly, throughout the early after-noon and really existed until I spoke to you and got your view of the state,of the I think it was really only at that point that I had the full under-reactor, etc.
standing of the situation and the condition of the plant.
Another item which occurs to me was the deficiency in our ability te get wire service report, tv coverage, e tc., first hand. Throughout the day yesterday, we This were receiving second and third hand reports of what had been in the. -news.
caused some difficulty in that we were being requested to react to these stories without having first seen them.
I'm sure you recognize the importance of having all of the key people up to speed on the status of situations such as this. We had a number of calls, for example, from reactor suppliers. One, in particular, came from Ted Stern of Westinghouse.
Af ter having received early information on the event which indicated that all in effect, systems functioned properly, that there had been no releases, and that, everything had worked, Westinghouse was preparing to go to KDKA in Pittsburgh with some of their engineers to explain how the safety systems functioned in an event Needless like this and to try to turn this into a positive pitch for the industry.
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s to ecy, that' wtuld havs bsca o cubotantial c=bzrraccment to W:tinghtusa and, ff, and brd Secrn not c
,belit.ve, to the industry's credibility had that come o I'm afraid that might have occurred.
In addition, we were also receiving calls from senior executives from area urfli
, interested in trying to find,out since they were being harrassed by various nws egencies, why a similar occurrence could not happen at one of their plants.
A final note - when the news release was finally pulled together and signed off S's everybody, it was Mr. Kuhns who provided the direction as to which of our various regulatory people and Board of Directors, etc. needed to receive copies of the release, and exitetly what should be sent to them.
Again, I think in the future, we should have a set procedure for releasing this kind of information and deter-l mining who gets it and when to assure that proper and timely distribution of this information occurs.
In su= mary, and upon reflection, I think that despite the observations made above, There was con-things vent reasonably well, at least in Parsippany, yesterday.
ciderable confusion.
I think that this was, at least in part, a result of the fact that many of the key individuals in company mantgament were not here, and the effect of their absence was compounded by the difficulty in obtaining hard infor=ation on exactly what had gone on.
I recognize in light of the work which might be required during the next several days that you may not have a chance to focus on this memo, but I would certainly be available to talk to you about it whenever you have an opportunity.
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