3 Youths Escape Big Intake Pipe; Vehicle Doesn’t
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MIAMI — Three teen-agers looking for a shortcut to the beach drove into a nuclear power plant canal and had to swim for their lives before their four-wheel-drive vehicle was sucked out to sea through a huge discharge pipe.
The teen-agers escaped out the windows of the vehicle as it floated in the warm waste water.
“I took a swimming class last semester in high school, and I was saying ‘thank you, thank you, thank you’ to my swimming coach all the way to the edge,” 17-year-old Tim Svane said Wednesday.
The vehicle ended up jammed in the pipe more than a quarter of a mile away on the sea floor, delaying a restart of one of the plant’s reactors.
The youngsters had gone through an open gate onto Florida Power & Light property near the St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant, 120 miles north of Miami, said utility spokesman Ray Golden.
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