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And it was at that point that I realized, in fact, our whole administration realized, that we could not rely on Metropolitan Edison for the kind of information we needed to make decisions.

The reality is even if you are a hands-on Mayor or Governor or chief executive, at best, you must know about 10 or 20% of what's going on. Otherwise, you never get through the day... I was very hands on, and there's lots of stuff I didn't know, and lots of things that either went wrong or right that I would find out about afterwards.

My belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences.

The timing was terrible, and having one disaster after another didn't help. I think the pictures on television of the way in which the disaster was handled also helped to turn off the public and Congress.

There was the scientific and technical progress which couldn't be predicted by the state.

I believe the projects were a social experiment; we were laboratory rats stacked on top of each other, and people just knew, inherently, that there was something wrong. There's not a lot of regard for the property by the residents.

We were trying to get all of the planes down out of the sky. And we watched as the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed - something no one expected and anticipated. And you could sit there and see and be aware that thousands of people were at that moment being killed as a result of the terrorist attacks that struck the United States.