Evacuation from a Nuclear Technological Disaster

TLDR

The 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania highlighted the growing risk of nuclear disasters worldwide and created the first empirical opportunity to study evacuation processes in such events, underscoring the need for broader evacuation research beyond natural disasters that annually displaced nearly 90,000 people. The study aims to identify the spatial and temporal dimensions of evacuation behavior among TMI residents, develop a conceptual model of evacuation decision‑making in nuclear disasters, and highlight geographers’ role in evacuation planning. The authors employed the Three Mile Island incident as a case study to establish a foundation for geographic evacuation research, developing hypotheses on spatial‑temporal evacuation patterns and decision‑making models that serve as preliminary generalizations for future studies.

Abstract

unique peacetime technological disaster occurred in northeastern United Ag States in the spring of 1979: an accident in a nuclear-generating plant. Because of the proliferation of nuclear power plants throughout the world, the possibility of comparable disasters elsewhere increases. We chose to examine one aspect of the 1979 American disaster: evacuation of the affected population. The nuclear accident at Three Mile Island (TMI) near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, dramatically emphasized the need to broaden the range of evacuation studies to include technological disasters, particularly ones of nuclear origin. The crisis at Three Mile Island provided the first opportunity for an empirical examination of the evacuation process in the aftermath of an unexpected and unprecedented nuclear disaster. We used it as a case study in order to seek a foundation for geographical research in the nascent field of evacuation behavior and planning in response to technological disasters. Our objectives are to identify the spatial and temporal dimensions of evacuation behavior among TMI residents, to offer a conceptual model of evacuation-decision making in response to a nuclear disaster, and to suggest the role for geographers in evacuation planning. Because of the uniqueness of the case study, we offer generalizations and models to explain the decision-making process for nuclear evacuation not as definitive conclusions but rather as hypotheses for future studies. Joseph Hans and Thomas Sell compiled a list of more than 500 natural and technological disasters that required evacuation during the period 1960 to 1973.1 Their figures indicated that an average of almost 90,000 persons per year were forced to evacuate their homes because of hurricanes, floods, train derailments