- Jeff,
-
- These very interesting accounts are part of the history
of the TMI partial core melt. It is very important to remember that people
did die and were harmed by the radioactive releases. Dr. Steven Wing has
performed epidemiological analysis showing the increased cancer and leukemia
following the emergency.
-
- note: I suspect that the account given by Marie Holowka
describes where everything turned blue was the result of inhaling something
dangerous; however, we have heard accounts where pockets of blue air were
visible.
-
- Scott Portzline
- http://www.tmia.com/accident/witness.html
-
-
- Three Mile Island Witness Testimonials
-
- The following three testimonials are from "Three
Mile Island: The People's Testament," (1989), a series of interviews
with approximately 250 Three Mile Island (TMI) area residents from 1979
to 1988 done by Katagiri Mitsuru, Professor of Social Psychology at Kyoto
Seika University and Aileen M. Smith, free-lance journalist and co-author
of the book Minamata.
-
-
- Marie Holowka, Farmer, Zion's View, PA
-
- After the TMI accident, Marie was treated for thyroid
problems. She was subsequently diagnosed for cancer and has since had several
operations and is currently receiving chemotherapy. She lives with her
two sisters and brother. The Holowka's have had many animal problems on
their farm since the time TMI began operation in 1974. Here Marie talks
about the morning of the accident. (The distance from the milk house to
the house is a little over 100 feet.)
-
- "I went to the barn around four, four-thirty (in
the morning). We were milking cows. And the barn started to shake. And
I heard a rumble like underground. Well, I wouldn't say an earthquake.
But it was going like 'brrup, brrup, brrup.' And then it shook and shook
and we didn't hear the big rumbles. But every now and then you could hear
a rumbling in the ground. And Paul, my brother, was with me and he says,
'That's an earthquake.' I said, 'Paul, it don't sound like an earthquake.
Earthquake, it just rattles. But you don't hear the noise, the brrup, brrup.'
It just (was) like there was boiling water coming underground. And I said,
'I think something happened at Three Mile Island.' Then we kept milking.
-
- And Paul left me about six o'clock. He wanted to listen
to the radio to hear what was going on; if it was an earthquake or what.
And I finished milking cows a little bit after seven. And I came in the
milk house and I cleaned it up to get ready for the milk truck. And so,
about ten after seven, I started for the house, 'cause I've been working
since early morning. And I looked outside. It was so blue! It was so blue!
I couldn't see ten feet ahead of myself! I got scared.
-
- So I walked out and I'm going to the house. There's a
stone walk there. And I fell down, see. But I was scared and I thought,
'Well, maybe I stumbled.' And I went about twenty feet away from the milk
house. That poison gas must have hit me. I tumbled. And then I finally
got myself up and I'm going in. And I went forty feet more, and I fell
down again. And I said to myself, 'Well, this must be poison gas, because
I know I didn't stumble. I just collapsed.' And I couldn't get up. I'd
try to get up and I couldn't get up. I couldn't get no strength to get
up. I finally got myself up, and I went towards where those flowers are.
Then I fell down (again). And I said, "Oh, my. Now I really know something
happened at Three Mile Island! It must be poison gas. I just fell down.
I had no strength to get up. I said, 'Must I really die at Three Mile Island.'
-
- And I stayed there and I struggled. Nobody came out of
the house to see me or nothing. So, I finally got up after struggling there
maybe five minutes or so. I walked to the house. I opened the door. I stumbled
into the house. I said to them, 'Did you hear anything about Three Mile
Island?' They said, 'No, we didn't.' I said, 'You know what happened to
me. I fell down three times before I could come to the house.' I was just
something like a drunk.
-
- We stayed in the house. It was blue. You couldn't see
anything or nothing. And we were scared. Everything was blue. Everywhere
was blue. Couldn't see the building or anything. It was just heavy blue
all that time. We closed up our doors. We stuffed rags underneath the door
so this wouldn't come in. But I think it was all the way in.
-
- And we stayed there. It was a warm day. It was a hot
day. It was so hot. We shut all the windows and all the doors and we stayed
inside. And about nine (AM), we listened to the local radios. But they
wouldn't say anything. They were only playing Dolly Parton's music"
-
- (It is quite certain that Marie's above account took
place on March 28th. However, her account of media coverage on evacuation
follows right after, leading to the possibility that this passage may have
occurred on Thursday.)
-
- (Further description of her walk from the milk house
to the house.) "You just got to feel funny. You'd just get an awful
feeling in your body. Just like a pinching feeling going through you. Like
electricity would be going through you. Did you ever get pinched with an
electric fence? That kind of little shocks. All the way through your body.
You could feel it going through your system. And in my nose, and in my
mouth. And then you could taste like a copper taste in your mouth. I could
taste that. And then I just got to feel so bad. Nothing was biting me,
but you just had that feeling. I just started to get weak. I just got real
weak. I thought I was scared. I guess I just folded up and fell over. I
couldn't get up. I didn't have no strength to get myself up. Or my brain
or something wasn't working. I couldn't get my coordination to get up.
I don't remember if I was conscious or not. I guess I wasn't conscious
when I went down, because I don't remember going down, see. And I fell
on the stones. I was lucky that I didn't get broken bones.
-
- Nothing like that ever happened to me before or ever
since. Nothing."
- (Marie said the blueness, as well as the taste, lasted
several days. )
- (Interviewed August 12, 1986.) [Marie died of cancer
in 1992.]
-
-
- Jean Trimmer, Farming, Lisburn, PA, 54 years old.
-
- "Friday evening, it was very windy and the rain
was falling steadily at our farm. Our cat named Friday had gone out to
relieve himself, and when he didn't come back to the window sill within
a reasonable length of time, I became worried, for I could hear him mewing
in a very strange fashion. His mewing was more of a howl than a meow. Thinking
that he would come as soon as I had opened the front door, I did not bother
to put on a coat, but only put a scarf over my head since I had just washed
and set my hair. Friday didn't come as expected. So I went to the front
porch, standing back against the wall of the house and called and called
to him. He kept howling. So I went over to the banister, leaned over, and
called him again.
-
- The wind had been blowing steadily from the north to
the south. When suddenly, there was a moment of intense stillness. The
wind stopped abruptly, and a wave of heat engulfed me, bringing the rain
in all over me. It happened so quickly that it startled me and made such
an impression on my mind that to this day I still relive, over and over,
those few minutes. I cannot get away from them.
-
- The cat finally came, and I bent down to wipe the rain
from his coat, and we both went in. I was thoroughly disgusted when I felt
my own hair which became soaked about halfway back because the wind had
blown my scarf nearly off. Then I did a really dumb thing. I washed my
face and hands with soap and water and only dried rain from my arms, neck,
shoulders and legs with a towel, not using any soap and water. About an
hour later, my skin, including the skin on my face and arms had become
pink and very prickly. I excused myself from the people in the living room,
went to the bathroom and scrubbed all the exposed areas with soap and warm
water. Then I applied a lotion to those parts that had been uncovered.
Before I went to the bathroom, a neighbor had come to the door asking my
husband to help spread the word that there was real trouble at TMI, and
gave him a handful of papers with evacuation directions on them, and would
he please distribute them to the people living on beyond our property.
So he and our daughter left to do that immediately.
-
- On Saturday, my skin was a darker shade of red and extremely
irritated, while the front part of my scalp was itchy to the point where
I had to scratch almost constantly. On Sunday morning, several people at
church asked me where I had got my sunburn. My face, arms, neck and legs
were quite red. And small, hard bumps had come out on my forehead and up
into the front of my scalp. On Tuesday, I washed my hair again using three
applications of shampoo instead of the usual two. The itch was awful.
-
- About three weeks later, white hairs appeared all through
the front of my hair and the tops of my eyebrows were white. The hair came
out in my comb in unbelievable amounts. I could now see my scalp through
the thin hair on the front half of my head. I made an appointment with
the person who gives me my permanent and he in turn gave my head some special
treatment. Eventually, the hair loss stopped and several weeks later new
growth appeared. The hair on my forearms was always flat to my skin, but
more appeared to be growing in all directions. When Dr. Kirk (who headed
the Environmental Protection Agency office in Middletown, PA.) came to
my home to interview me, I showed him this erratic growth on my arm. It
is still growing in the same manner. My throat is no longer sore on the
inside, but some of the ugly discolored skin remains on the outside. To
this day, almost six years after TMI, I am not well.
-
- I have lost my left kidney completely. It just dried
up and disappeared with no medical explanation whatever. And my case was
presented by my kidney specialist to a symposium of doctors at the Hershey
Medical School. None of them had ever had a case like mine, nor had they
any explanation of such an unusual happening. Also, our eldest granddaughter
has been hospitalized on two occasions for abdominal problems. She and
her sister visited us for three summers following TMI and spent much of
their play time on that same front porch. There was no record of similar
abdominal problems on either side of her family tree. We can only hope
and pray that both she and her sister and the other three grandchildren
will remain healthy, for they have all played on that same porch. The awful
part about this is that we did not even think of possible contamination
still remaining there. But we are just ordinary persons without any scientific
knowledge concerning radiation, et cetera. To this day, March 19, 1985,
the discoloration is still visible on my arms and neck. Red spots still
appear on my face, arms, legs, breasts, shoulders, abdomen with alarming
regularity. I can assure you that TMI is an ever-present fear in my life,
because the physical evidence is something I see daily. The traumatic fear
within me cannot be seen by anyone, nor felt by anyone else, but it is
there constantly in my mind. You cannot possibly know what happens inside
me when the TMI siren is tested or when, for unknown reasons, it suddenly
sounds.
-
- Thank you for listening to my sad tale, all of which
I would gladly swear to on an open bible. Thank you so much for your time."
-
- (Interviewed March 19, 1985.)
-
-
- Bill Peters, Owner of Auto Body Shop, New Cumberland,
PA, 46 yrs. old.
-
- "We heard on the news Wednesday morning (March 28th)
that there was a minor mishap or something like that down at Three Mile
Island. It was nothing that even concerned us. We kind of laughed about
it.
-
- Thursday, we were in the garage working. It's a large
garage and I have large doors that a tractor-trailer type truck would back
in. Well, my son and I, we were in there working all day on Thursday. We
weren't outside. We had the doors open 'cause the weather was warm. We
were inside working. We went up about nine-thirty, ten o'clock at night
and took a shower. I had come out joking. I said, 'I got a sunburn!' (Laughter.)
That was Thursday evening. And we were joking about it. We really didn't
think it was anything really that bad. It looked like we got a mild sunburn
at the seashore. Anything that was exposed. Because we had T-shirts on
and right where your arms went, it looked like the way you look like if
you were electric welding. You probably don't know anything about this,
but when you electric weld and you don't have yourself covered up, you'd
get burnt, you'd get red. It's similar. And this is what you look like.
-
- Friday, I was redder. Like you were laying in the sun
the first time you go out in the beginning of the year, and you'd get red.
That's what it looked like. Friday morning we were joking. Nobody wanted
to say anything. We were getting this hot feeling in the throat. And you
were tasting, it tasted like you were burning a galvanized steel with a
torch, you know, or welding it. This is the kind of taste you had in your
mouth. This is exactly what it tastes like. It made you half sick. Sometime
in the afternoon on Thursday we had started tasting it. And it kept getting
stronger and stronger. My son-in-law, he came home Friday from Hershey
and he says to me, 'I taste something.' And my daughter, she was working
at the hospital, and when she came home she said she was tasting it, and
they lived down the road here. And nobody would really admit what they
were feeling, because everybody thought we were imagining it. It was nerves
or something like this.
-
- Well, you feel hot down in your chest. Friday morning
I got up and I had blisters, little bitty white blisters on my lips and
in my nose. And then also I got diarrhea real bad. I had it that weekend
real bad. And you felt half sick in your stomach, half nauseated. See,
that could have been from nerves too. I mean nerves would do that to you.
And from that time on, it would seem like I was having trouble with my
bowels up to aboutoh, man about two or three months ago, I guess it was.
I was having problems. Not as bad as it was then.
-
- (Friday afternoon) while in the process of leaving, the
Fairview Township police come down the road and he hollered, 'Bill, get
the hell inside! I mean it. Get inside. Don't breathe the air! Close your
doors and windows!' So I waved to him, I said, 'Yeahkeep going!' (Laughter)
'I'm getting out of here! I'm not staying!' So, we kept loading. This is
about three o'clock in the afternoon. And this is when, I think, we got
the worst of it. So, we left here about four, four-thirty.
-
- When I got up Saturday morning my lips were burnt more.
And they were blistered. I couldn't blow my nose, it was sore. I never
had this before.
-
- Sunday morning I was blistered more. You know how you
get sunburn blisters. (But) I never got blisters in the sun. I never had
blisters on my lips before then. Down in like your throat was really hot.
It's like you couldn't drink enough. My chest. It was like putting hot
towels on you, except the heat came from inside. This is something you
can't explain. It's just like you were burning up inside. And you just
wanted to drink. I don't know if my getting sick with this heart condition
was related to the accident, but that burning feeling in the chest was
located right over where that valve went wrong. (Bill had to have a heart
operation in December 1980.)
-
- Now, it didn't affect everybody the way it did me. Now
my son, he was like that. My wife stayed in most of the time. She got a
little bit. She could taste it, and got a little hot, but she didn't get
like I did.
-
- We were gone seven days. We had a four year old male
German shepherd. He was healthy when we left. He knew how to take care
of himself because we go to Florida every winter normally, and he would
stay in the garage. We had food prepared. We had 200 pounds of Purina Dog
Chow separated out in boxes. I had ten five-gallon cans of water that he
always used. Same cans he ever used. And, we left a window cracked in the
garage, and he had a mattress in the back. When we came back, he was laying
on his mattress dead. And his eyes were burnt white. Both eyes burnt white.
He didn't eat no food, hardly any food. He drank a whole five-gallon can
of water, and he threw it up all over the garage. He was dead a lot more
than a day. We walked in, we were sick. And you could still taste this
like burning galvanized steel, metal."
-
- (Darla, Bill's wife, said, "The mobile home was
all shut, the windows were shut and everything. When we came home, outside
you couldn't taste it. When we opened the door and walked in, then you
could taste it.")
-
- It made you half sick. We had five cats out in back.
And four of them were lying dead with their eyes burnt out, burnt white
like they were, just like they were burnt bad, you know. One cat was in
the back of the box, in the cat box back in the corner. And her one eye
was burnt. She was blind. She lived six months after that, then she died.
There might have been more that that. We had kittens. The three kittens.
And they were all dead too. We had milk and we had water for the cats,
the same as we did for the dog. And it was in a fenced-in area where no
other dogs or animals could get in. There was water enough to last them
for a month. And there was food enough to last them for a month. It was
under a porch where it's protected from the weather.
-
- I washed the garage out. We washed everything out in
the mobile home too. She washed the walls down. And we washed all our clothes.
-
- Right about the second or third week of April, I guess
it would be. It could be the last week of April. We were going back to
work, and you know, you kind of even forget the whole thing. And I was
starting mowing, and I started chopping up birds. All kinds of birds. No
one kind in particular. I had that (five foot hydraulic) bucket, I would
say a quarter to a half full of dead birds that I dumped down over the
bank and covered them up back there before I could cut the grass. And that's
when I got scared. And I was scared ever since.
-
- That summer, the walnut trees were starting to bud, but
there was no walnuts on the trees. The leaves left the walnut trees. It
looked like winter. That's how it looked all year with the walnut trees."
(Darla said that the following year, the leaves were maybe twice as big.
Those that were four inches were eight inches. Six-inch leaves were nearly
a foot.) "They looked like palm trees. Super big.
-
- That whole summer (1979), 'til about August there were
no flies, no mosquitoes, no nothing. You'd be outside eating and there
would be no flies. There were just no flies around, and there were no flies,
no mosquitoes, no bugs! (Laughter.) It was unreal. Like 4th of July, you'd
be eating and there were no flies. You have a barbequethere were no flies.
They came back about August. And there were no birds at the time either.
I mean none.
-
- I've lived here all these years, I don't need them kind
of statistics. All I know is that I don't like it when you look out the
window and you don't see I mean it's crazy I knowbut you don't see any
birds. There's two birds that come up across here and that's it. And this
used to be loaded with birds, 'cause we had bird feeders around. You go
down the road two miles, you'd see all kinds of birds and pheasants and
stuff. You go out to my mother's in Lemoyne, she got hundreds of them in
her backyard. This is what I don't like. I walk or run a mile a day. Down
over here, down there where we walk. It's a year and a half since we've
been walking down that road and running, and I haven't seen a bird, I haven't
seen a pheasant, I haven't seen anything. No rabbits. There's one or two
little scrawny squirrels. And that's it.
-
- I had the Audubon Society come over. They were here on
Saturday (January 1983) and they just couldn't believe it. They were out
here with their binoculars and looking around. They were out here about
two and a half hours. I called them and told them about this. I got tired
of it. I wanted to know in my own mind too if I'm over-reacting or something
like thisI mean, if everything is all coincidence.
-
- The NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) guy was here.
He stood here and he said, 'I was in the center of the plume and the plume
was nowhere up near here.' He says it was down farther down the road. But
he was down the road. How does he know it wasn't up here? Nobody ever checked!
He's telling me that I imagined my lips got blistered. I imagined our dog
and cats died, that there was no walnuts on the trees! That this couldn't
have happened. And there were no dead birds up there. He says if it was
that kind of a thing, you couldn't live here now. He says the people around
here couldn't be living here. I say, 'Well, not too many are living here
right now!' you know. (The cancer rate has been very high since the accident
along the road where Bill lives.)
-
- I'd like to know from somebodyI mean, what's your personal
opinion? If you think I'm foolish, if I'm over, overcautious or overdoing
the whole thing."
-
- (Interviewed January 7 & 31, 1983)
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