by Brian Edwards Tiekert
"3 Mile Island was releasing radiation for three days before they told anyone."
Sal Mangiagli eats as he drives, like a trucker. He holds his bagel in one hand, his coffee in the other; god only knows how he manages the wheel.
"At 3 Mile Island, they told pregnant women to leave the area for a five mile radius. They had a voluntary evacuation of 40 miles-ripple effect."
The gearshift, protruding from the steering wheel, has some twenty hair bands hanging from it. A yellow one holds back Sal’s long black ponytail; the yellowjacket colors peek through the space between headrest and seat.
"I know a guy on the emergency board," he says. He’s talking about Haddam, CT, where Sal and his family live a mile away from a nuclear power plant. "He said if that reactor ever goes, he’s gonna go to the package store, bust open a window, grab a couple of bottles of liquor, and sit down on the corner and watch."
"Why?" asks his son Cody from the passenger seat.
"Because if that reactor goes, he doesn’t think there’s anything he can do."
The speedometer, like the car, refuses to go over 50 miles per hour. Next to it, an orange warning light advises the driver to check engine soon. The car is an ancient station wagon, in the best tradition of domestic automobiles. It’s a Buick Impala, and the inside is a sea of aging red vinyl broken only by a few islands of scratched and peeling fake wood trim. The smell of the vinyl, familiar and somehow comforting, saturates the air inside the car.
"A few years ago at our plant," he laughs wryly. "It’s our plant, now ... They had a problem because something was boiling the water that was in the reactor vessel. They had a nitrogen bubble that was building up, and it was forcing the coolant water out of the reactor up onto the floor of the containment room. The nitrogen bubble had been building for three days, they didn’t know why, they didn’t know how to stop it ..."
Sal waves across two pedestrians in a crosswalk. "They were getting ready to take the rods out, so they had disconnected their temperature gauges, their water level gauges- they had no idea this was going on."
At a town meeting following the incident nobody, including Haddam selectwoman Marge DuBold, could say when or if the surrounding towns had been notified that there was an emergency situation. "I wanted to go up to the podium and say ‘What do you mean you don’t remember if you got a call from the reactor saying "Cross your fingers, Marge, it might blow?"’ He looks across at his son, Cody. "You don’t remember?" I mean, Bullshit!"
In the trunk, the cardboard faces of piled-up protest signs squeak against a pane of Plexiglas Sal used to replace a broken window. Signposts jut out the rear. Behind them trails a twenty-two foot long, nine foot high, silver-painted fiberglass barbell decorated with radiation signs and stenciled letters that read "MOCK NUCLEAR WASTE CASK."
"Pretty cool, huh?" Sal says in a one-sided dialogue with the drivers that stare as they pass by. He’s decked out in a white paper jumpsuit, a painter’s uniform; it’s supposed to look like a radiation suit. On the seat next to him is a black rubber gas mask that he doesn’t wear when he drives because it fogs up too much. He nudges it toward his 11-year-old son and asks, "Wanna wear the mask, Code?"
The costumes and the cask are props to help raise awareness about a new bill in the Senate, S-104. The bill provides for the transportation and storage of almost 40 years’ accumulation of high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power plants across the country. It revokes regulations concerning site suitability to approve Yucca Mountain, Nevada as a dump for the dirty laundry of the atomic age.
More immediately, the bill would pre-empt national, state, and local environmental laws in transporting over 1,300 casks of radioactive waste along the Connecticut highway system. Transport routes would pass through major cities like Hartford; the resources the bill sets up to deal with the possibility of an accident are pitifully inadequate. The giant barbell hitched to Sal’s station wagon is a close model of one of these casks. The major difference is that the real thing would contain 20 times the radioactivity released by the Hiroshima bomb.
All of which is why Sal Mangiagli is spending his Saturday afternoon wearing a paint suit and towing around a 22 foot fiberglass dumbbell. He’s traveling along I-84, which would carry the bulk of the shipments, and stopping in downtowns and shopping centers to hand out flyers and talk to people about the bill.
Sal looks in the rearview mirror and points out his wife, Rosemary, following behind him. The two of them run the Haddam chapter of the Citizen’s Awareness Network [CAN] out of their home. Four college activists, decked out in paint suits and clutching flyers and pamphlets photocopied just that morning, ride with her.
When Rosemary drives with Cody up front, she lets him shift gears while she keeps up a constant chatter. Cody bends over the gearshift while she snakes her arm behind the passenger seat and faces the back of the car. She wears short hair, seashell earrings, and hand-woven necklaces; she’s beautiful.
"Did you all see the front page of the Middletown Press?" It’s lying on the back seat. The headline article is about the closing of the Haddam nuclear power plant, the plant in her town, the plant she and Sal played an instrumental role in focusing public attention on. Word for word, the article is practically identical to the press release Rosemary and Sal put out. "They printed the whole damn thing, it’s great!" She tells Cody to shift into reverse. "People are really starting to look to CAN for comments."
The car is a clean, fairly new, Chevrolet Celebra. Blues Traveler plays on the radio, cassettes are piled up in the back: Joan Armatrading, Roger Daltry, Mac Parker, and The Clash. On top of the dashboard is the obligatory grade school art project: a bird made of Styrofoam, construction paper, and a couple of dyed feathers. Extra napkins are pinned behind the visor on the driver’s side. A large bag full of bagels and cream cheese rests in the center of the car.
Rosemary pulls into a parking lot next to the cask. She has Cody put the car in park and then sends him over to Sal with his coffee; she ruffles his hair as he leaves. "He just got a haircut, we’re trying to break him away from the hoody look." She roots through the bag of bagels and surfaces with a fistful of napkins which she waves around indignantly: "Look at how many napkins they gave us, I hate this ... you know what we use them for, when we run out? Toilette paper!"
Sal describes how he and Rosemary met:
"Rosemary’s brother owns a diner in West Hartford; and she was working there in the mornings when he first opened to help out. I was working a job in Simmsbury, living in Hartford, and stopping at the Quaker Diner for breakfast every morning ... it was the end of ‘87, nine years ago." Rosemary graduated from Southern and became a research chemist in 1982.
"She had been to Greece about three times, to spend a couple of months or so at a time. And she fell in love with this guy in Greece, and he asked her to marry him, and she said ‘yeah’ and so they were engaged."
Sal speaks without periods. Each relaxed sentence ambles into the next; concepts drift through his speech with a blatant disregard for structure and form. The only way he punctuates his speech is with the words "um" and
"you know," both of which he stretches out deliciously, as if to savor his next words before he speaks them.
"When Rosemary and I met, I had been separated from my ex-wife for about eight months, and going through a custody battle for the children, and I was-you know-just talking to her, we would go out together with some of her friends or even with her mother; her mom was really into jazz so we used to go to some jazz clubs together and stuff..."
Sal’s arm snakes around the passenger seat as he checks a turn. "And we’d get into these conversations: I’d say, ‘So, are you going to move to Greece or is your fiancé gonna move to America?’ And she sez ‘Oh, no he doesn’t want to come to America, we wanna- you know, we’ll- I’ll probably move to Greece.’ And I sez ‘Oh’ and I sez ‘and what will you do there’-you know-’Is he really traditional? Is he from a really traditional family?" Because they’re a lot like the Italians, they kind of chain the woman to the stove and that’s it. And it’s the first time she really thought about it, and it flipped her out, she said ‘My God, what am I doing?’ She sez ‘No, I don’t want that.’ And I sez ‘Well what are you guys gonna do?’ And she sez ‘I don’t know.’ And then, three or four months later she broke up with him and we started going out."
Sal’s bringing the cask to a couple of malls right off of I-84. Cody asks him if he’ll buy him a hat at the mall.
"As long as it’s not Nike," Sal replies. Nike does business with Indonesia and has much of its manufacturing tied up in the forced-labor camps of East Timor. "In fact, I ordered a couple of things for you. I got you a comic book on Michael Jordan."
"A comic book?"
Sal and Rosemary are raising two children, Cody is eleven going on ‘twelveteen,’ and Nicole is 14. "My son really loves Nike stuff." He laughs. "And he was questioning me on why I wouldn’t buy Nike stuff even after I had told him why. Then after a while he wanted to know more, and we ended up writing a letter. We found out that the head CEO of Nike is this man named Philip Knight and we got his address and we wrote him a letter.
"What Cody said in his letter was that-you know- ‘My dad won’t let me buy any of your stuff, and I really like your stuff, and he says that you do business with butchers, that Indonesia has invaded East Timor ... and if this is true then I’m gonna tell all my friends not to buy your stuff too.’ And he signed it and he put his age down on it and Philip Knight never wrote back."
He pulls a half-smoked, hand-rolled cigarette out of the ashtray and starts smoking it. The tobacco is American Spirit, a brand grown organically and marketed without any unnatural additives.
"Nicole has taken a stand on quite a few issues and she’s really quite good about it ... One of the things that I found that I needed to explain to her was that at the same time that I wanted her to engage like that, and to stand up for things that she believed in, I wanted to make sure that she had a really good reason for it, because especially as a young teenager you can do that and you can sorta get off just on the response, regardless of what the cause is." He takes a long drag on his cigarette.
One time Nicole challenged a teacher who refused to answer a student’s question on the grounds that he should have paid attention the first time. The teacher wound up apologizing and thanking her a week later. "She [Nicole] was really pretty diplomatic about it ... It’s really great to see that. I know when I was her age I was oblivious to taking a stand on issues and, you know, I never saw my parents go to town meetings or engage in activism or education and community issues and stuff." He takes a last drag on the cigarette and throws it out the window.
In the space where wind shrieks between the rumbling cask and the aging station wagon, three bumper stickers cling to the car just above the rusted-out bumper:
"1-888-NADER96"
"DARE to keep the CIA off Drugs"
"My Daughter Achieves"
The first stop that the cask makes is Fleet Bank; Sal needs to withdraw money to pay three members who canvass (solicit donations) for CAN. Sal gracefully parks the cask across three spaces and enters the bank. His small, trim body, clothed in white and capped with a black beret, is a striking figure in the empty parking lot; before he can get back to his car he’s approached by a woman who asks if he’s with Greenpeace. He hands her some literature and talks about the S-104. Thirty feet away from the cask, he detours to a standing van and passes some literature through the window to the driver.
"You guys, he is not my husband." Rosemary laughs as she watches from her car.
It’s important to reach everybody... but all the same, you sometimes catch yourself wondering if Sal has an off switch. Sal talks nuclear waste to neighbors he sees in supermarkets, with other parents at Little League games, with strangers in the printshop where he copies his "litterature." When he eats out he talks nuclear waste to the waitresses and gives them flyers to read after work. The cashier gets a pamphlet with the paid check.
Sal and Rosemary’s interest in activism is as new as their marriage. Sal can’t exactly remember what got him started: "I’ve talked to people about it since I’ve become active, and I remember even when I was just out of high school ... My sister’s boyfriend at the time worked for the oil company, driving fuel for Hess Oil out of Weathersfield and [he] had said to me-'you know-I could get you a job at the oil company.’ And I said ‘I don’t wanna work for no oil company.’ I sort of had the same beliefs for a long time but they were more subconscious ... And then the same thing happened with Pepsi, I was offered a job to drive for Pepsi and I refused it." Pulling out of a narrow street and up to a line of traffic, Sal blocks two lanes with the giant dumbbell.
"When George Bush announced his run for presidential candidacy, that really galvanized a lot of things for me ... I felt I needed to learn a lot more about politics and stuff because to have the head of the CIA be our president was a really scary thought to me." Sal waves his thanks to a Buick that lets him into the lane.
"And then living in a reactor community- we bought our house [and] didn’t consider at all that we were a mile away from a nuclear reactor. It took a few years before it started to sink in, and then some very close friends of ours who live up in Roe Massachusetts, Deb and Fred Katz"-Deb is the president of CAN-"They were also living under the same kind of denial and their reactor was struck by lightning. Actually Yankee Roe and Vermont Yankee were both taken out, in the same electrical storm. And it woke them up. And we’ve been involved with them from the very beginning." A passing driver honks three times and flashes a thumbs-up at Sal. He waves back and smiles.
Sal and Rosemary try to set up in two mall parking lots right off I-84. They’re kicked out of both after about five minutes. At one mall, Sal asks to speak to the supervisor of security. Rosemary just wants to leave.
"He’s such a damn outlaw," Rosemary mutters. "I’m the goody two-shoes, he’s the bad boy."
The supervisor arrives in an electric car with three muscular guards. His conversation alternates friendly exchanges with veiled threats; Sal strings him along, looking for inconsistencies, loopholes, trying to trip the guard up. "Don’t finish his sentences, let him stumble over his own thoughts" he advised his wife before the supervisor arrived. Sal’s relaxed, drifting speech patterns become a tactical advantage as the guard contradicts himself several times, anxiously trying to finish the conversation. The impact of what the guard says is consistent, however. The parking lot is private property.
Rosemary thanks the guard, anxious to leave.
"Here, let me give you some of our litterature," says Sal.
When the guards have left in their tiny electric cart and the cardboard signs are being returned to the rear of the rusting station wagon, Rosemary says she thought the guard was nice.
"Oh, you think everyone’s nice." Says Sal. When she’s out of earshot, he goes further: "She’s a bunny, she’s a rabbit, and rabbits don’t like anything confrontational."
Rosemary takes Cody home and Sal bundles the other white-suited pamphlet-pushers into his decrepit old station wagon. They’ll go to downtown Hartford and maybe a few supermarkets, just like the week before. Sal and Rosemary, idling next to other at the first intersection, blow kisses and mouth endearments through rolled-up windows.
When you call Sal and Rosemary’s home in the evening, it’s usually one of the kids that picks up. They ask for your name and a second later you hear them shouting for a parent in the distance. In the background, it’s not unlikely to hear the the familiar sounds of The Simpsons or Seinfeld on the TV. Upon entering the house, the greatest danger you face is their zealously friendly black lab Nugget. The house is full of the smell of woodsmoke in the winter. It’s surrounded by tree-covered hillsides. Everything seems perfect, an idyllic model of rural suburban living.
The town is far from idyllic, however. Beyond those tree-covered hillsides is a nuclear reactor that’s slowly irradiating the surrounding area, and the town is full of people to scared to confront it. Although CAN has over 200 donors in the Haddam area, Sal and Rosemary are the only two active members.
"One of the issues that we were addressing was the issue of routine emissions of radio-nucleides out of these reactors, out of the stack, and gaseous releases and also liquid batch releases into the Connecticut River." This creates what’s called an effluent pathway, a small area "downstream" from the reactor that receives much higher doses of radiation than anywhere else. "When the National Institute of Health does health studies, they do a twenty mile radius around the reactor ... They really dilute the impacted people living in this effluent pathway by including all of this other data in it."
A study on Deer River valley, a pathway area near the Yankee Roe reactor, showed a 50% increase in five different cancers, a 40% increase in heart disease, a 110% increase in infectious disease leading to mortality, and a 700-1000% increase in children born with Down’s Syndrome. "I think people are terrified to look at that, and to believe that could be true." Sal says.
Not everyone in Haddam is happy to see the reactor decommisioned; the company that owns it pays half of the community’s property taxes.
One day Sal’s wife came home to a hate sign planted up on the lawn, close to the window where it could be seen clearly from inside. "It said that we were hypocrites, and if we didn’t like nuclear power to get the fuck out of town." Sal sighs, then smiles devilishly.
"It’s good to know that we’re effective ... We’ve gotten a lot more calls from people thanking us."