How the Three Mile Island Accident Was Made Even Worse By a Chaotic Response
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
For tellers at a Shrewsbury, Pennsylvania bank, the final days of March 1979 should have felt like business as usual. Instead, they were sheer chaos: customers piled up, trying to withdraw money in the days before ATMs.
“Customers were stopping by with their cars packed up to flee, withdrawing their cash,” recalled bank teller Bailey Brown in 2014. “One even showed me the diamond necklace she bought; she figured we were all going to die and she wouldn’t have to pay for it!”
Shrewsbury wasn’t under evacuation orders during the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island . But people were evacuating from the town 40 miles away from the power station anyway. The response by local, state and national officials had been so alarming—and confusing—that the public didn’t know what to think.
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A few short months after Three Mile Island, the largest radioactive spill in US history took place on the Navajo reservation and received little or no attention.
It is still being cleaned up..(Super fund site)