We’re all gonna die! On June 9!

I found this old, old post, written twenty-four years ago when I lived in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Although it’s somewhat tongue in cheek, the fear in our small town was quite real that June 2001.

The nuclear power plant in Limerick (photo) was extraordinarily vulnerable. And extraordinarily close by.

Obviously, we survived. Shortly thereafter, the Phoenixville bomber went underground. We’ve not heard anything from or about him these last twenty-four years. Occasionally a local newspaper or television station will resurrect the story. But he was never caught, despite eyewitnesses and taunting letters.

Enjoy — but keep in mind that Senator Joni Ernst sounded an awful lot like this domestic terrorist when she said, "We all are going to die."

June 4, 2001 — As I write this, I have exactly five days left to live. Five days till the Phoenixville bomber blows up the Limerick nuclear power plant in his protest against man’s misuse of the environment. It’s there in black and white, his plans. Reported by the newspaper, confirmed by a local television station.

Actually, he’s been making life pretty miserable the last fifteen months. Five bombs have gone off in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Most had been placed in or near automobiles. It’s been a miracle of sorts that no one was killed in the blasts. Death surely was his intent.

We’ve had the ubiquitous copycat bombers too, who have made fake bombs that clear out businesses and residences while the bomb squad detonates the device, “just in case.” Kids started making bomb threats to get out of school, until school districts toughened the consequences for crying fire in a crowded building.

I don’t need to tell you that every little suspicious object, every person who looks out of place, is immediate cause for calling the police. Tailpipe falls off a rusty muffler? Three police cars surround it. A package falls off a truck outside the post office? That post office is closed down, yellow tape blooms its entire circumference, and crowds wait at a respectful distance till the bomb squad arrives.

When the latter incident happened a few months ago, my regular post office had to handle business for two. Long lines snaked through the lobby and people waited most impatiently for harried clerks to sell them stamps.

The only topic of conversation in that place? You guessed it. The Phoenixville bomber. A young woman with two precocious children moaned aloud her anger. “I don’t want them to catch on,” she nodded towards her children. “I’ve been trying to keep them from finding out.”

The older woman behind me lashed out at no one in particular. “Well, I for one am sick and tired of no one doing anything to catch this fellow. Surely they should have been able to find him by now. After all, it’s been over a year!”

Our Phoenixville bomber likely is not a suicide bomber who will strap one on and blow himself up, like Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis in the Middle East, or disciples of Timothy McVeigh in the USA. So we are only looking for suspicious packages. We are watching for a single individual on a bicycle who has a thing about urban sprawl.

What we have to endure is merely inconvenient (unless of course, he does in fact blow up the power plant in five days). He is not driving a wedge between groups in our community, since everyone is targeted, Jews and Muslims, Black and white, all nationalities, creeds, and cultures. The bomb squad has the luxury of looking for one man only, not this man or that child or the woman over there. And they have a pretty good idea what he looks like. He’s not a faceless personality blending into a crowd.

“Things over there” in the Middle East, in Ukraine, in places where conspiracy theorists plot to maim and kill, those “things” make lots more sense when they are in your own back yard. Especially when you have only five more days to live.

Note: One sighting of the Phoenixville bomber was one block from my mother's house.

Comments worth keeping

What a scary time to live through.

--Tree Langdon, June 4, 2025.

I googled immediately after reading your piece to see if he'd been caught. Terrifying how many of these cases go unsolved. I wonder if they have an technology they can use today to increase the odds of identifying him.

--Elizabeth Lamont, retired professor and writer, June 4, 2025.

Questions? Comments? Speak your mind below. Before doing so, please log in using the email address that corresponds to your orders or newsletter subscription. Note: MARKDOWN is the app's label for formatting shortcuts.

If you enjoyed this post and would like to leave me a tip, I would be grateful! Buy Me A Coffee!

Return to Common Table index.

Image credits: Top photograph--Aerial photo of nuclear power plant in Limerick, Pennsylvania. February 4, 2007. Photo by Arturo Ramos. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license. Bottom photograph--Shopify, public domain for platform users.

No part of this post may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the “fair use” of quotations that are properly cited and credited, including identification of the translator if applicable. No part of this post may be included in any Large Language Model without proper licensing from the copyright holder, Denise Elaine Heap.