Because
radiation
can’t be
seen, and one
can become exposed
without
knowing it,
“people were
trying to
find some
concrete
way to
understand
it.” - Lonna Malmsheimer

President Sam Banks meets with key professors and administrators on how to handle the crisis. From left, clockwise: Prof. Lonna Malmsheimer, Prof. T. Scott Smith, Sam Banks, Prof. Priscilla Laws and Treasurer Jim Nicholson.

For 25 years Dan
Bechtel has hung onto this T-shirt, created
during the crisis for a contest held among
students who stayed on campus.

Priscilla Laws briefs the campus on radiation
levels.

George Allan (left) joins President Sam Banks in addressing the community.

Community Studies
Center Director Lonna Malmsheimer (center) looks over some of the materials being processed for the TMI Web site by, from left, Johanna Montero ’06 and Caroline Chirinos ’06.

Eric Epstein (right), chairman of TMI Alert, talks with Kim Lacy Rogers (center, in rain coat) and students in the Oral History Workshop: Three Mile Island, 25 Years Later, in the spring.

Quite by accident—literally by accident—Dickinson’s entrée to cultural studies through field work began 25 years ago with the nuclear incident at Three Mile Island. A team of social scientists, flying by the seat of their pants, took their tape recorders and microphones into the Carlisle community to glean reactions to the nuclear threat. Since then, and especially with the advent of Dickinson’s Community Studies Center in 1997, faculty and students have used technology to interact with communities, locally and internationally, then documented, archived and shared their findings. The following stories look at Community Studies-oriented projects of yesterday and today.

TMI at 25 - Then

College rallied as nuclear peril threatened

BY Sherri Kimmel

George Allan walks in, tall and trim, armed with a talisman well known to those acquainted with his 21 years as dean of the college. He’s bearing one of his many Green Books—the 7-1/2-by 12-inch, hardbound, green, of course, chronicles he used to document meetings and random musings during his tenure. Allan has just stopped by the college’s Archives and Special Collections to retrieve this volume which covers one of the college’s scariest, but in many ways, finest, moments. He opens the book whose pages are barely yellowed 25 years after he recorded his account of what transpired at Dickinson College in the days following the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history—an event that occurred just 22 miles from campus.

Allan describes a dizzying time, which began on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, when a malfunction in Unit No. 2 of the Three Mile Island nuclear-power plant near Harrisburg caused a release of radiation. While trying to assess the danger to the campus he watched the flight of untold numbers of faculty and students. “We don’t go into classrooms and count desks,” Allan relates dryly, about the lack of reliable data.

Still, he estimates five or six professors “left right away, and one in fine arts didn’t come back. He was raised near [the toxic dump site] Love Canal.” For this professor, one ecological disaster was enough. By the Sunday after the TMI incident, Allan logged in his Green Book that an estimated 35 percent of students remained on campus, the majority having left for home or a second go at spring break. Since it was certain that classrooms would be unfilled, the administration of President Sam Banks decided to cancel the next week’s classes—for only the 10th time in the college’s history.

Those students who remained broke the tension by playing Frisbee and coining gallows-humor slogans for a T-shirt contest run by Robert Cavenagh of the fine-arts department. In these days before e-email, the college relied on WDCV radio to keep the campus informed, with student DJs broadcasting 24/7 for four straight days.

Professors and administrators staffed the phone lines ’round the clock, fielding calls from frantic parents. Calls would spike just after Walter Cronkite’s evening broadcasts, Allan recalls.

Despite the turmoil, he felt, the show must go on. The president and faculty taught seminars on offbeat topics—a magic demonstration or lecture on psychological reactions to disaster by Banks, a depiction of the explosions at Pompeii by Phil Lockhart in classical languages, and so forth.

“The college had a responsibility to remain open and functioning, until the governor ordered us to close up and leave,” Allan explains. “This was especially true because we had been designated by the Office of Emergency Preparedness as a reception site should there be an evacuation order for people living within a 20-mile radius of TMI.” Though 140,000 people eventually fled the Harrisburg area, they did so out of fear, not government edict. Dickinson was not their destination.

To Allan, it was essential that the college take its cues from government authorities. The alternative was ”social chaos, anarchy.” Still, he says, he and other members of the administration respected those who chose to leave. Though he scrawled in his Green Book that he feared conflicts between those who chose to stay and those who opted to leave, he recounts now, “There were no recriminations that I remember. One of the genuine achievements of the crisis was the way the college community supported one another despite these differences in what should be done.”

Priscilla Laws, one of the major players in the campus drama, says, looking back, “I think the college handled it beautifully.”

Laws and fellow physicist John Luetzelschwab, both now recently retired, were instrumental in keeping students, faculty and staff from hitting the panic button. In the several days following what later was determined to be a partial core meltdown, the two L’s gave twice-daily briefings on the situation, based on radiation readings they were taking and their own expertise on the health effects of radiation.

Forty students joined them in the analysis of data gleaned from soil samples that Luetzelschwab dug from his home garden, less than two miles from the damaged reactor, and from air samples collected on campus. Only once did they find themselves in a dilemma. Heavy rain fell shortly after the reactor damage occurred, causing what normally happens with rainfall—a doubling in the amount of radioactive radon gas.

Laws, Luetzelschwab and Allan describe how they grappled with explaining this to the campus community without sounding alarmist. Eventually they devised this statement, Laws says: “The atmospheric radiation level is normal for current weather conditions.” Other than that easily explicable blip, the physicists saw no appreciable rise in radiation levels. They presented their findings to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Says Luetzelschwab, “They also were part of the legal record and lawsuit [filed in federal district court in Harrisburg].” Of the more than 2,000 plaintiffs who filed claims of personal injuries purportedly caused by exposure to radiation released during the accident, 10 test cases were selected for review. Judge Sylvia H. Rambo ’58 ruled in 1996 that the 10 plaintiffs were unable to connect their cancers to the TMI accident. Since the accident occurred, no new reactors have been built in the United States. Laws and Luetzelschwab agree that the hiatus is due more to the costliness of construction than to fear of nuclear peril.

Despite the dire predictions swirling around them in 1979, the physicists never panicked. “John and I knew that because we were 22 miles away, even if we heard a news report that the plant had melted down, there would have been time [to evacuate the campus],” says Laws. “We didn’t think there was an imminent threat at any time.”

Because the campus physicists and astronomers—which included Laws’ husband Ken, T. Scott Smith and Neil Wolf—did not flee, the community felt more at ease. However, Laws knew her white Toyota station wagon was being closely watched. “People said if they saw it parked, they were OK.”

One faculty member who had her blue Dodge van gassed and ready was Lonna Malmsheimer of American studies. “If the plant blew, my then-husband and I were going to load our two boys and the golden retriever in the car, come to campus, pack in as many students as we could, and go.”

But trusting in the physicist-led campus news briefings, she hung on and started up her own “instant social science” research group with Daniel Bechtel of religion and anthropologists Julius and Melissa Kassovic. Together, these members of the Reaction to the Reactor Study Group and about 10 students conducted nearly 400 interviews with residents of Carlisle and the campus community.

“We wanted to find out what we could about the American people and how they cope with a crisis,” Bechtel explains. “We had students here and thought we might as well do something educational rather than sitting around and waiting for a solution to the problem at TMI.”

While the Kassovics examined how humor helps people cope with unexpected disasters, Bechtel queried individuals about religious reactions, and Malmsheimer looked at ways people related the unprecedented nuclear event to personal experience or popular-culture referents, such as science-fiction films.

Bechtel found that many religious folk either reported not praying or didn’t recall praying, since the TMI incident was a technological not a natural disaster like a flood, to which they could relate. “They weren’t sure what they could pray about.” They also had trouble linking the TMI experience to biblical images.

Malmsheimer discovered that people related the event to “their own cultural inventory—sets of knowledge we carry around generally and bring to bear on a particular event. What they used was dependent primarily on their age.”

Older persons mentioned bombings during World War II, while the younger set linked TMI to Hollywood blockbusters—such as the recently released nuclear-disaster flick The China Syndrome. Because radiation can’t be seen, and one can become exposed without knowing it, “people were trying to find some concrete way to understand it,” Malmsheimer notes.

Though journal articles and conference papers resulted from the Reactions to the Reactor Group’s work, the book that Dean Allan hoped for never materialized. Laws and Luetzelschwab wrote a paper on their soil-sample studies, co-authored with Lisa Pawelski ’79, now a busy Pittsburgh dermatologist, but then a busy leader of students helping to analyze data.

At the time of the incident, Pawelski looked rather bemusedly at the panicked press and public. Armed with her physics-major know-how, “I was not feeling terribly worried.” Instead she was among those who calmed the worried, giving interviews for Harrisburg TV stations based on the soil analysis she was doing.

“We were the bearers of common sense, scientific information. We helped to calm the paranoia of those not schooled in science.” Pawelski is still playing that role, recently giving a presentation on TMI at her son’s middle school. “My main point was that, while there was danger, not a lot happened.”

For Pawelski, the TMI experience taught her “how good institutions like Dickinson deal with disaster, but frankly, it didn’t change my mind about safety or the desirability of nuclear power one way or another. When I gave the talk to the sixth-graders they talked about the nuclear disaster. I call it an incident.”

John Frisch ’80, now a Washington lawyer, chose to stay on campus, but unlike Pawelski he wasn’t busily working. “It was a bonus spring break in Carlisle with my classmates.” After the initial shock of the news reports, “there wasn’t a sense of panic. The college did a good job of convening informational meetings.”

“I think students who stayed experienced what a community under pressure feels—a sense of being involved with others who were as concerned as they were with issues they felt were a real threat,” Bechtel reflects. “For students and faculty this was a significant time.”

TMI at 25—Now

Dickinson leads in study of nation’s worst commercial nuclear accident, as it did a quarter century ago

By Sherri Kimmel

“For lack of a better term, this is Three Mile Island University.” —Eric Epstein

Who is this man, and why is he saying these things about Dickinson? He is the tough-talking anti-nuclear activist firebrand who leads two organizations devoted to safe energy use, TMI Alert and EFMR Monitoring Group. A hard man to satisfy, this former history professor has placed his trust in the college, encouraging academic pursuits centered on the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, which occurred on March 28, 1979.

“Dickinson is the premier institution for research related to the Three Mile Island experience,” he says. He notes the three areas where the college is breaking new ground in documenting the disaster: the Community Studies Center (CSC), the Department of Physics & Astronomy, and the Archives and Special Collections of the Waidner-Spahr Library.

The Community Studies link to Three Mile Island has been ongoing since the partial core meltdown occurred. Twenty-five years ago,
CSC Director and American Studies Professor Lonna Malmsheimer joined three other faculty members (see story, page 16) to study Carlisle community reactions to the nuclear threat in what she dubs “the college’s first large-scale field-work project.” Since then, oral-history projects have become a hallmark of the college.

The social scientists focused on religious reactions, the use of humor to diffuse fear, and cultural referents people drew upon. Over a few months, professors Malmsheimer, Daniel Bechtel and Julius and Melissa Kassovic, and about 10 students conducted 400 interviews, which the group promised not to make public for 25 years. Now that the time is up, Malmsheimer will post them on a Web site that the CSC plans to have online in February at: www.ThreeMileIsland.org.

Because the original interviews were conducted in a hurried fashion and sometimes without proper permission, the site will not identify the speakers. “Procedures for this did not exist 25 years ago,” asserts Malmsheimer. The occupation and location of speakers will be listed, however.

But the transcripts, which Dickinson students typed this fall from the original texts, are just the tip of the TMI iceberg. The CSC Web site will have two sections—a virtual museum and a research center that may be searched by using key terms. The museum portion will include reminiscences by Dickinsonians who were involved in TMI events at the time of the incident, including Dean George Allan, Bechtel (see page 23) and physicist John Luetzelschwab. The research center will contain coverage done by four newspapers—the Harrisburg Patriot-News, Lancaster Intelligencer, Philadelphia Inquirer and Carlisle Sentinel.

The site also will offer new work done this past spring by students in the Oral History Workshop taught by Malmsheimer and Kim Lacy Rogers, professor of history. Students interviewed 15 people who lived near the nuclear-power plant in March 1979.

One of the students in that class was Julie Vastine ’03, now assistant director of Dickinson’s ALLARM. The former environmental-science major says, “We got the history, public policy, a bit of the science and talked to people who were there. This forced us to make our own conclusions, and we saw how time may or may not heal some of the wounds.”

Vastine’s subject was Mary Osborne-Ouassiai, who in 1979 was a young mother living a few miles from TMI. After the accident she became, says Vastine, “a self-created expert” on plant mutations who has lectured worldwide on “the biological effects of radiation.”

Doing the oral-history project allowed Vastine “to go along the journey in a different way than I would have by reading about [TMI] or watching a documentary.”

Hearing from another expert in the class, Professor of Physics Emeritus John Luetzelschwab, altered Vastine’s preconceptions about nuclear power. Luetzelschwab, who began radiation readings within hours of the TMI incident (see related story, page 16), expressed his pro-nuclear-power point of view.

“My first inclination was there should be no nuclear power at all,” Vastine confesses. “Now I have a more balanced perspective on nuclear energy.”

Luetzelschwab is, for Eric Epstein, one of the college’s TMI-related assets. Eleven years ago, Epstein wrung an agreement from the plant’s operator, GPU Energy Corp., to provide $1 million for radiation monitoring. It was Luetzelschwab and his students that Epstein chose to do monitoring and training of volunteers.

“Dickinson has trained scores of people and will always play a part in radiation monitoring,” he says. “John still does some analysis for us for low-volume air samplers.”

The third prong of what Epstein considers Dickinson’s expertise on Three Mile Island is the Archives and Special Collections. Seeking a repository for the records of TMI Alert, “which has been in court continuously for almost 24 years,” Epstein turned to Dickinson. “I wanted a top-flight institution that offered archiving services. I was gratified that Dickinson agreed to be that institution.”

To help with the project, which promises to occupy 100 linear feet of space, archivist James Gerencser ’93 applied for an $8,700 matching grant from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The grant allowed him to hire Robert Reeves ’02 to work full time for five months cataloguing and organizing the TMI Alert collection.

Already there are 40 linear feet—or 55 boxes—of TMI-related documents in the archives, including seven personal collections. John Osborne, associate professor of history, is handling government documents for the project. Osborne and Gerencser also are helping Malmsheimer with technical aspects of her Web site, which will contain some of the archives’ materials. Gerencser explains, “We’re a community of scholars—we’re here to help one another.”

Late in the fall, facing the monumental task of getting the site up and running, Malmsheimer remarks, “We have way too much material. We’ll only be able to put up a sample Web site. We can keep students working on this for some time. I don’t know if there will ever be a last interview.”

Epstein, for one, would be content to see the college continue forever its study of Three Mile Island. “You can’t research TMI without visiting Dickinson College, physically or through cyberspace. Any journalist or student of the accident must spend time at Dickinson.” •