The Three Mile Island nuclear accident. I was a young newspaper reporter (21 years old) standing outside the plant the morning of the accident when the workers evacuated. They refused to say what if anything was wrong. I was the first reporter on the scene, as I had been writing about (the many) previous problems at the plant. The morning started off as a local news story. By lunchtime, it was international news. There obviously were no cell phones. There was a single pay phone in front of the plant’s observation center where we all had to take turns phoning in our stories.