h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You failed to mention the lovely bottleneck - I don't know if it has an official name or not, that's just what it was always called when we lived there - where all the traffic from Lemoyne, New Cumberland, Wormleysburg, etc. tried to get across that tiny bridge...

But I do remember the Kipona Festivals....

But that's on the *other* side of the river...

You need a special pass or something to go over there.

. you beat me to it.

I was going to say the place should have been on the list because it was always like a PARKing lot...

But of course the people who frequent the City parks are as often as not coming from the west shore

I wonder if that's as true now that 'Old Shakey' is gone...

I would imagine it just means more cars trying to find a parking space during major events.

That's about right....

BTW, have you done an article on TMI yet? We'd just moved to Lemoyne a short 2 weeks before the "incident", and had gone to see The China Syndrome the night before. The line about a meltdown making an area the size of the state of Pa permanently uninhabitable was truly ominous.... and then we woke the very next day to reports of a possible near meltdown....

I received more radiation on that day than just about anyone else in Pennsylvania...

I was at the dentist's office when the reports started coming out getting an x-ray!

It was a pretty frightening time (I was still in school) and my mother was crying and telling me that if we were evacuated to take care of my younger brother...

Our family, with the exception of my father, fled to the mountains of the Cumberland-Adams county border to my uncle's farm. Dad had to stay behind because he was a cop and had to defend the area from looters.

It's a very personal topic for me and I've been afraid to get into it too much because I might not be able to be objective...

But it is something I'd like to do someday. Especially since I'm in charge of my schools evacuation plans in the case of another 'incident'.

It's a personal topic for all of us who were in the area at the time..... We were so new to the area that I didn't even know there was a nuclear power plant nearby until after seeing China Syndrome the night before.

My hubby was working for a Hbg radio station, and if the whole place ended up having to be evacuated, he would have been one of the ones telling everyone where to evacuate to... but he could not leave.

I had just hung laundry out on the clothesline.... exposing myself to who knows how much of the radiation, then came back inside to hear that I shouldn't be going outside, but I still had to go out and get the laundry later, exposing myself to who knows how much more. Then they said we were supposed to keep our windows closed. Mine were still open. Then they said not to use any exhaust fans. Had to go turn them off too.

Family was on Eastern Shore of Md, which meant that if I left, I'd have to go closer to the hot spot to get there. Didn't want to leave anyway, because my husband couldn't leave.

All in all, a very nerve racking time.



In retrospect, I've probably had a lot more lifetime exposure to radiation than you have - obviously, you're younger than I am since you were still in school at the time of the TMI incident, so your mother would not have been subjected to constant x-rays (which were a lot stronger in those days than they are now, too) to track your development while she was expecting you. They stopped doing that shortly before I was born.

When I was 6, I had my tonsils removed, but they couldn't get my huge adenoids which had grown way out towards my ears - so they nuked them instead - They tell me I would have been completely deaf by the time I was a teenager if they hadn't done that.

But that pales in comparison to growing up on a farm across the road from a stone quarry that was closed just a few years ago because of the tremendous amount of asbestos in the rock. The dust from this rock and asbestos coated everything in the area, the air was incredibly thick with asbetos dust, which would roll down into the valley-like area of the farm. My brother used to go out in the fields and find rocks with asbestos in them, and we played with the things, for goodness sake! How clearly I remember him holding a lit match to the asbestos to show me it would not burn...

All in all, we all face all kinds of dangers all the time - everything from the car that almost smashed into me the other day to anthrax scares. So even though it was a scary time, I can look back and see it was just another danger that passed.