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PITTSBURGH (Newsradio 1020 KDKA) - Forty years ago today the late KDKA Radio midday host Mike Pintek broke of news of the biggest nuclear disaster in American history, the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island.
“This is Mike Pintek in the KBO newsroom, MedEd Company officials had to shut down their Three Mile Island nuclear power station unit number two,” Pintek said on March 28, 1979.
Pintek was the news director at WKBO at the time when the news broke.
Pintek got a call from his traffic reporter Captain Dave Edwards who told him there was a lot of chatter on his police scanner about an emergency.
Pintek called Three Mile Island and surprisingly was patched through to the control room
“Next thing I know, a guy picks up the phone there’s all kinds of commotion in the back ground and I told him who I was and he says, ‘I can’t talk now, we’ve got a problem’,” Pintek told National Geographic for a documentary film.
A cooling system failure and subsequent human error led to a partial meltdown of the Unit 2 reactor at the Dauphin County site.
Radioactive gases were vented into the air, leading to a partial evacuation of nearby residents and panic nationwide.
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