Power plant gets ‘quite the shock’
Granite State neighborhood reacts to tremor
Bob Canning was in bed in his Seabrook, N.H., home yesterday when the earthquake struck.
“I heard this great big bang. My girlfriend went down cellar to see if the furnace blew up,” the 65-year-old retiree said yesterday. “It was quite a shock.”
Canning recalled the morning rumble later at the beach, where he had come to walk his golden retriever, Dizzy, along the picturesque bay where the Seabrook nuclear power plant sits.
“There’s also that possibility, if you had a big earthquake, what would happen?” he said. “Would the nuclear plant hold up? It’s getting old.”
The 2.7 magnitude quake occurred shortly before 9:30 a.m. about 8 kilometers southwest of Exeter, N.H.
Long gone are the days of protests of the plant, which opened in 1990, but yesterday’s tremors rattled a few people.
Over the bridge at Hampton Beach, one man told me he’s always concerned about the power plant. There’ s radiation monitoring equipment around the station, he said, and he has a radiation monitor at his home.
“I’ve been here 50 years. There used to be protests over there and people ripping down the fence,” he said. “Obviously, if there’s a huge earthquake there’s going to be leakage.”
Melanie Drohan was sitting in a chair in her living room in her Exeter condo when Teddy, her Shih Tzu, who usually sleeps during the day, began barking at her.
“I think he knew something was going to happen,” Drohan said. “I was working on my computer and it felt like it went right under the whole house.”
The power plant was being built when Drohan was a kid growing up in Nashua.
“You never see it in the news anymore,” she said.
Another woman, Debbie, walking her dog, said she was sitting on her couch having tea in her Hampton home when the earthquake struck. She said it felt like a big piece of machinery went rumbling by outside.
“Hopefully,” she said about the power plant, “it’s safe.”
But most people out walking yesterday weren’t too fearful of the quake’s impact. Mary Sheehan was sipping her coffee in her Exeter home when the “whole house shook.”
“It sounded like an explosion,” Sheehan said.
But the plant’s safety didn’t cross her mind. Sheehan and her husband helped build the plant. She was a documents clerk.
“It’s probably why we have a high level of confidence” she said.