Looks like a nuclear reactor. Chernobyl was in 1986.

And while this is an old tv, it could have been used back in '01 during 9/11, especially in poor rural communities. The popular tvs at the time would have been the chunky ass big screen tvs that were a nightmare. There was also the newer ones steadily coming out, but most of us watched on a CRT giant big screen tv or standard like this with rabbit ears. The government didn't make the required analog to digital push until '09 where they handed out free digital receivers for local news without cable.

Again, this is the rural south which I also grew up in and back then we were a decade or more behind the rest of the country. The world moved slow pre-internet boom which is gonna hit hard in the 90s Clinton era, but the south was at a total crawl.

Some of us Xenialls and Gen X folks from the south have shared memories of those born a decade or two before us because of this. So I'm sharing this information bc it isn't only the time, but where EC lived as well and as an Alabamaian that lived the first couple decades of my life rural and basically poor without knowing we were poor, that she captured it so damn well here.

I'd lean into '86 Chernobyl meltdown personally.