News Archive 2003

To the Many Things to Fear at Indian Point, Add Fear Itself
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
February 1, 2003

As the government reassesses emergency preparedness at the Indian Point nuclear power plant, it faces a conundrum: the more often that opponents of the plant say the emergency plans will not work, the more likely they are to be right.

That conclusion was outlined in a recent report by James Lee Witt, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is reviewing disaster plans at Indian Point.

Beneath the basic conclusion of Mr. Witt, now a consultant to New York State, that the plan is inadequate, is a second problem: the current debate over Indian Point is having the perverse effect of making emergency action, if necessary, harder, and people who dislike the plant are making things worse.

"Advocacy groups use language whose emotional content can increase unnecessary evacuation, and thus can have adverse consequences for public health in the event of a release," the report said.
Unnecessary evacuation, experts say, would clog the roads with people who could safely stay put, a phenomenon argued over since 1979, when emergency planning for nuclear plants began, called "shadow evacuation."

How much would occur is a matter of speculation, but Mr. Witt said some parties were encouraging it. "In pursuit of their agenda to close Indian Point, some have misused" data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, he said, "presumably to frighten and alarm the public. Misuse of information can lead to behavior that may endanger public health and safety."

FEMA is supposed to sort this out sometime in February, when it will produce a new report on preparedness for the reactors, in Buchanan, N.Y. The report will consist of its evaluation of the September 2002 emergency exercise at Indian Point and an evaluation of Mr. Witt's work. Current officials of the agency said they would not talk about the Witt report until their review was done.

But Mike Beeman, a spokesman for FEMA, listed exactly the same concern as Mr. Witt: "It will work if people understand what they should do if there were an event that occurred at the plant, and understood that they should listen to people providing the directions to them." Otherwise, he said, the potential for paralysis on the roads would increase.

Why, then, is the public becoming more concerned without becoming more educated? Because, according to the Witt report, some people want it that way, to close the plant.
"Their persistent misuse of scientific data contributes to public misinformation," his report complained. "Ending those parts of their effort that can with fairness be termed demagoguery would serve the public better, and make more effective the participation of advocacy groups in the regionwide planning process."

Mr. Witt did not further define which advocacy groups he was talking about, and a spokeswoman for his consulting firm said he would not comment further until the report was complete. It is currently in a "public comment" period that resembles those that accompany the official reports of the government agency he used to head.

And no one was willing to own up to deliberately misrepresenting information to scare the public.
"There is nothing that we've said publicly that is inaccurate or misleading," said Kym Spell, a spokeswoman for Riverkeeper, the nonprofit organization that is one of the most prominent opponents of the nuclear plant. "I can't speak for James Lee Witt; I don't know who he's referring to," she said. Riverkeeper's position is that emergency plans will never be good enough.

Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, another prominent opponent, said that opposition to Indian Point was now a "great social movement" and that like all such movements, it was diverse and might, in fact, include people who said things that were not true. Mr. Brodsky said he had not concluded that adequate emergency plans were impossible, but that there were plenty of other reasons to close the plant, many of them economic.

Mr. Witt himself, although he found numerous deficiencies, stopped well short of saying the plans could not be made workable, and also said that there was more to coping with an emergency than planning. "Organizations and people have the ability to adapt during a response, so actions can vary emergency to emergency," his report said. "Many preparedness shortfalls can be addressed in a response using emergency processes or adaptation, whereas systemic issues can be much more problematic. We have focused on the systemic, while acknowledging that many things can be `handled' if an emergency were actually to occur."

How FEMA will read that balance is not clear; Mr. Beeman said it had a clear scope of what it would look at. (Not on the list, he said, was whether opponents were misusing data to scare the public.) But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is likely to have the final say, has a different outlook, according to one of its members, Edward McGaffigan.

"We have to have `reasonable assurance of adequate protection of the public health and safety,' " he said in a telephone interview. "It doesn't say absolute assurance or perfect protection of public health and safety."

"A lot of this emergency planning stuff may well come down to a vision that these plans have to be perfect," he said.

BACK TO TOP