During his long career in radio news, one story always stayed connected to longtime broadcaster Mike Pintek.
On the morning of March 28, 1979, Mr. Pintek, then the news director of WKBO-AM in Harrisburg, got an urgent call on the two-way radio from two colleagues.
“Captain Dave Edwards was our traffic guy. He called me on the two-way and told me that something was happening at Three Mile Island, and that he needed to talk to Mike,” recalls Dan Steele, who was programming director of WKBO at the time. “So I used the intercom and told Mike to pick up the two-way.”
He jumped on the phone to call Metropolitan Edison, the plant owner — and that’s how he ended up breaking the news of the most serious accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history.
“The number that he dialed actually connected to the control room at TMI and he was told by an operator, ‘I can't talk right now, we got stuff going on,’” Mr. Steele said. “So he was bounced around to a couple of different people and explained that we were going to go on the air with the story, and we needed to say something.”
Mr. Steele, now retired, said the company “basically told [us] everything was under control.”
But, of course, it wasn’t. One of the units had failed, setting off a weeklong crisis at the plant just south of Harrisburg.
In a WKBO archived interview from April 1979, Mr. Pintek recalled confusion at time and “four or five sources of information...conflicting with each other” on the seriousness of the situation.
Mr. Steele left for a business trip, and called Mr. Pintek the next morning.
“I called the newsroom to check with Mike and see what the story was, and Mike said, ‘Dan, let me put it this way, I’m ready, I’m prepared to meet my maker,” and I thought, ‘Wow, this sounds pretty serious.’ This was when the hydrogen bubble was the big story, and Mike was staying to cover the news and do his job.”
“I still get emotional thinking about that call.”
For the rest of Mr. Pintek’s life, he was associated with his call to the Three Mile Island control room. The call is recorded in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s report on the incident.
He was featured in the PBS American Experience 2001 documentary on the titled “Meltdown.” In an interview with the Park City, Utah’s Park Record newspaper before the film’s debut, he described living near the nuclear power plant before the disaster as “neat.”
“I was just amazed, wide-eyed looking at the thing,” he is quoted in the Park Record.
Shortly after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Japan, Mr. Pintek sat for an interview with KDKA Radio colleague Larry Richert to compare the incidents.
“The similarities are, during Three Mile Island and during this incident, you’ve got the government, you’ve got the power company, saying paradoxical things, and one minute everything’s under control, everything’s fine, there’s no danger...and then the next minute you would hear ‘plumes of radiation,’” he said to Richert.
Mr. Pintek, 65, died early Wednesday morning of pancreatic cancer. He spent three decades on the air at KDKA Radio.
First Published: September 12, 2018, 7:35 p.m.
