Chapter 6

EMERGENCY RESPONSE

Plant staff woke and alerted Chernobyl’s Manager Viktor Bryukhanov, who returned to the power station by around 2:30am.150 He ordered for the emergency bunkers to be opened, including the main bunker beneath his administration building, then went straight to his office. On the way, he saw the damaged reactor building and assumed the worst. After failing to make contact with his senior managers from the phone in his office, Bryukhanov called for a meeting in the main bunker.151 There, he learned there had been a serious accident: a hydrogen build-up had detonated in one of the emergency water tanks, but it was believed that the reactor was intact.152 Plant workers were preparing a water pump to supply more cooling water to the reactor, and firefighters were tackling blazes on the roof and in the turbine hall; the situation was under control. When questioned on the level of radiation in and around the plant, dosimetrists reported that the only functional radiometer they could find indicated 1,000µR/s - 3.6 roentgens-per-hour. Compared to normal levels this was high, but not immediately life threatening. Bryukhanov and Dyatlov assumed this was an accurate measurement, despite knowing it was the maximum measurement the device could display.153 In reality, radiation levels were as high as 8,000,000µR/s - a staggering 30,000 roentgens per hour - in some parts of the plant.

Bryukhanov relaxed - 1,000µR/s wasn’t so desperate. Local Communist Party officials - men more senior to Bryukhanov within the Party - soon joined him at an imposing table inside the command bunker to discuss evacuation, but feared causing a panic and the possible repercussions if it turned out to be unnecessary.154 Together, the men chose to assume they faced the best-case scenario. Bryukhanov reported to his superiors in Moscow that the reactor was intact, and thankfully the accident was not as terrible as first feared. They instructed him to write a schedule for getting Unit 4 back up and running, and were assured that the matter would be resolved. Soon after this, staff located a 200R/h radiometer but it, too, went off the scale. Bryukhanov declared the device broken and refused to believe it. Dyatlov and Bryukhanov ignored other staff members sent to fetch readings too, claiming that the men they sent were fools and the devices worthless junk. Within hours, Dyatlov became too sick with acute radiation syndrome to continue working. Despite having now seen for himself the chunks of graphite blocks lying around the plant’s grounds, he still didn’t accept what had happened.

The plant’s firemen played a fundamental role in preventing the already catastrophic accident from becoming unimaginably worse. Arriving at the scene with his men within minutes, 23-year-old Lieutenant Vladimir Pravik realised straight away that his team was ill equipped and insufficient in numbers to cope with such a widespread and damaging event. He called for backup from all units in Pripyat and the wider Kiev area, then ordered his men to split into teams and concentrate on Unit 3’s roof and the turbine hall.155 The building containing Unit 4 also houses Unit 3 (all four reactors are attached to the same turbine hall), and if the fire were to spread there and take hold, it would have been game over.156

Falling reactor debris had ignited everything flammable throughout the site. This, much like the necessity for conducting the run-down test in the first place, was Bryukhanov’s responsibility. During construction, the plant’s massive roof was supposed to be sealed with a non-combustible material, for obvious reasons. None was readily available in the required quantities, so to proceed on schedule he sourced bitumen instead, of which there was enough in storage.157 Bitumen is a highly flammable substance, banned from industrial use in the Soviet Union for over a decade (which is perhaps why there was so much of it lying around).158 The bitumen melted in the intense heat, sticking to the firemen’s boots, hindering their mobility and filling their lungs with toxic smoke. Blaming Bryukhanov for this is easy, but he likely had little alternative. There were constant shortages of supplies on a project this large and specialised - the infrastructure to provide for the numerous nuclear plants being built at the time simply didn’t exist. If he had refused to use bitumen, and the plant had fallen further behind schedule, he would have been removed from his position and someone else would have done it instead. Still, I regard using a flammable material to seal the roof of his power station as one Bryukhanov’s worst mistakes - there must have been another alternative.

The tragedy of the firemen who arrived to fight the blaze at Chernobyl is that, despite being a nuclear plant fire brigade, many of them didn’t seem to comprehend the full dangers of radiation. Those firemen rushing from brigades beyond Chernobyl and Pripyat certainly knew nothing. While there are conflicting accounts on the matter, a number of written testimonies from firemen suggest they hadn’t even considered radiation until they became weak and vomited; that a fire was a fire, and they fought it as such. Even then, some thought it was sickness from smoke inhalation and heat. Firemen stationed at nuclear plants in western countries are specially trained and wear specific equipment to help protect them from radiation. In the USSR, nuclear power station firemen wore no special clothing to minimise radiation exposure - not even a basic respirator, only a facemask with an air filter.159

One fireman said later: “We didn't know much about radiation. Even those who worked there had no idea. There was no water left in the trucks. Misha filled a cistern and we aimed the water at the top. Then those boys who died went up to the roof – Vashchik, Kolya and others, and Vladimir Pravik.... They went up the ladder ... and I never saw them again.160” Anatoli Zakharov, speaking in 2006, remembers it differently: “Of course we knew!” he laughs. “If we’d followed regulations, we would never have gone near the reactor. But it was a moral obligation - our duty. We were like kamikaze.161” Colonel Telyatnikov was in charge of the second wave of firefighters who arrived 25 minutes after the explosion. “I cannot tell you now who told me about the radiation,” he said. “It was a station worker. They all wore white uniforms. As we were putting out the fire, you had the impression you could see the radiation. First a lot of the substances there were glowing, luminescent, a bit like sparklers. There were flashes of light springing from place to place as if they had been thrown. And there was a kind of gas on the roof where the people were. It was not like smoke. There was smoke, too. But this was a kind of fog. It gave off a peculiar smell.162” None of the men he sent to the roof survived, and Colonel Telyatnikov himself died of cancer in 2004, having absorbed hundreds of roentgens fighting the fire. He was 53.

Incredibly, it transpired afterwards that no proper, full fire drill had ever been conducted at the plant. Even the procedure for fighting fire at Chernobyl was almost identical to any other industrial fire, with no regard for the possibility of radiation exposure - so presumptuous were senior figures that nothing could ever go wrong.163 By164 6:35am, when all but the blaze within the reactor core were extinguished, 37 fire crews, comprising 186 firemen in 81 engines, had arrived to battle the flames.165 A few brave firefighters even ventured inside Unit 4’s reactor hall itself and poured water straight into the reactor. The radioactivity was so intense that they received a lethal dose in under a minute. As with most other efforts to cool the reactor over the following days, this only made the situation worse. They were pumping water into a nuclear inferno so hot that most water either split into a dangerous hydrogen/oxygen mix or instantly evaporated, while any remaining water flooded the basement. Many firemen fell ill in the process, and were rushed to hospital in Pripyat, though it was not well prepared to deal with radiation sickness. Doctors and nurses were also irradiated because the patients they treated were so contaminated that their own bodies had become radioactive.

Initially, there was only one qualified Doctor at the plant, a 28-year-old Pripyat A&E physician named Valentin Belokon, who raced there with no prior warning of a radiation accident after receiving a call from a colleague.166 He arrived about half an hour after the explosion, but soon discovered the plant’s aid station was almost bare.167 Still, he did his best with what he had and soon noticed a pattern in the symptoms of the surrounding people: headache, swollen glands in the neck, dry throat, vomiting and nausea. Belokon realised what this meant, but selflessly worked for hours to help the stricken plant personnel and firemen, until he too became ill. “At 6 o'clock [am] I began to feel a tickling in my throat”, he said afterwards. “My head hurt. Did I understand the danger? Was I afraid? I understood. I was afraid. But when people see someone in a white coat nearby, it calms them. Like everyone else I had no respirator, no protective clothing... Where was I to get a respirator? I would have grabbed one - but there weren’t any. I telephoned the medical station in town: ‘Do we have any?’ ‘No, we don’t.’ So that was that. Work in an ordinary gauze mask? It wouldn’t have helped.168” A second physician soon joined him. Dr Varsinian Orlov spent 3 hours in the reactor area helping to stabilise the fallen firefighters, before feeling what he described as, “a metal taste in the mouth and headache sickness.169” Even ambulance drivers ferrying the wounded to Pripyat hospital got sick from the radiation emitted by their passengers.170

Chernobyl’s third reactor was in a precarious situation of its own. Once Unit 3’s Shift Chief Yuri Bagdasarov realised there was no backup water supply to cool the still-operating third reactor, because all water lines from the emergency tanks were connected to its devastated twin, he asked Chief Engineer Nikolai Fomin - who had by now arrived at the plant - for permission to shut it down. Fomin, who struggled to cope during the crisis, forbade it. By 5am, justifiably fearing the worst, Bagdasarov distributed respirators and iodine tablets to his staff to prevent radioactive iodine from building up in the thyroid gland, and then disobeyed his superior’s instructions; he shut down Unit 3 himself.171 Along with the firemen, he prevented the possible destruction of a second reactor. The decision to shut down Units 1 and 2 was not made for a further 16 hours. Fomin, meanwhile, ordered a trusted senior physicist to investigate the state of Unit 4. Like the others before him, his report of the reactor’s destruction was ignored and he, too, later died. Time and time again Bryukhanov and Fomin were told that the reactor was completely destroyed, and time and time again they disregarded everyone who warned them.

Captain Sergei Volodin was an Air Force helicopter pilot who often flew a specially equipped Mi-8 transport helicopter around Ukraine. The aircraft was fitted with a dosimeter that Captain Volodin had used in the past to test radiation levels around Chernobyl out of his own personal curiosity. Prior to the 26th it had never even flickered. On the night of the accident, he and his crew were on standby for the Emergency Rescue shift covering the wider Kiev area, making his the first aircraft to arrive on the scene. As he flew around Pripyat, an Army Major in the rear measured radiation from a personal dosimeter. Neither wore any protective clothing. Volodin’s equipment went haywire as he cycled through its measurement ranges: 10, 100, 250, 500 roentgens. All were off the scale. “Above 500, the equipment - and human beings - aren’t supposed to work,” he remembers. Just as he was seeing his own readings, the Major burst into the cockpit screaming, “You murderer! You’ve killed us all!” The air was emitting 1,500 roentgens-per-hour. “We’d taken such a high dose,” the pilot says, “he thought we were already dead.172”

Chernobyl’s full complement of morning-shift staff and Unit 5’s construction crews had not received word of the accident and arrived for work at 8am that morning, in spite of the surrounding devastation.173 The Construction Chief sent his crews home at midday because nobody would tell him what was going on, but most of the plant staff remained. All throughout the day of April 26th, firemen and operators continued to pump water into the reactor, succeeding only in flooding more and more of the basement with radioactive water. Bryukhanov gradually came to his senses once he began facing the fact that the reactor was destroyed. The question of evacuating Pripyat was broached soon after the explosion, but he had felt it too momentous a decision to make without very senior backing. He contacted Moscow again and requested permission to evacuate the city, but Communist Party officials, unaware of the full extent of the danger – ironic, since Bryukhanov himself had repeatedly assured them the damage was minimal – refused to consider it. An evacuation would cause a panic and spread word of the accident; nobody was to be warned.174

A special government commission consisting of Party officials and scientists were on their way to assess the situation, and would arrive over the following 24 hours. The commission’s leader was Boris Scherbina, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and a former Minister for Construction in the oil & gas industry. While not a low-level politician, Scherbina was not a member of the Politburo - the Soviet political elite - because nobody in the government realised how serious the accident was at this stage. The most prominent scientific member of the commission was 49-year-old Academician Valerii Legasov. Legasov held a Doctorate in Chemistry and was something of a prodigy, having enjoyed an unprecedented rise within Soviet scientific circles to become the First Deputy-Director of the prestigious I. V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. Even though he was not a specialist in nuclear reactors, he was a highly intelligent, experienced and influential figure, both within the Communist Party and the global scientific community.175

Saturday the 26th was a blazing hot spring day. Pripyat’s 15,000 children – who were particularly vulnerable to radioactive iodine - went off to school (children in the USSR attended school 6 days a week), while the rest of the city’s residents went about their normal day. There was even a wedding held that afternoon. All throughout the day, everyone in the area was being silently irradiated. “Our neighbour ... climbed up to the roof about 11:00 hours and lay there bathing in trunks to get a sun tan,” recalled Gennadiy Petrov, a former plant worker, while speaking with Grigoriy Medvedev. “He came down once to get something to drink, and he said that his tan looked great today, better than ever before. He said his skin immediately gave off a burned smell. And he was in very high spirits, as though he had had too much to drink... Toward the evening, the neighbour who had sunned himself on the roof began to vomit intensely, and they took him off to the medical station.” Another eyewitness reported: “Word came about an accident and fire at No. 4 unit. But what exactly happened, nobody knew... A group of children from our neighbourhood bicycled over to the bridge near the Yanov station, to get a good view of the damaged reactor unit. We later discovered that this was the most highly radioactive spot in town... They later came down with severe radiation sickness.176”

Unsurprisingly, given that the new city existed solely to house Chernobyl’s builders and operators, word soon spread that a serious accident had occurred at the plant. “Different people learned about the accident at different times, but by the evening of 26 April almost everyone knew,” remembers Lydumila Kharitonova, a senior engineer. “But still the reaction was calm, since all the stores, schools, and institutions were open. We thought that meant it was not so dangerous. It became more disturbing as evening approached.177” That evening, many of Pripyat’s families flocked to their balconies and those of their neighbours, to watch the mysterious glow coming from the stricken reactor.178 As strange as it may sound, the people of Pripyat and the surrounding areas were very fortunate to have excellent weather on the night of the accident and over the following few days. Had it been raining, radioactivity would have poured from the skies and drained into the Dnieper River, drastically increasing the number of victims. Instead, most particles stayed high in the air, where their impact was lessened. They were lucky, too, because of the test’s timing: it was a spring weekend, when many people were out of town. Those still at home were asleep indoors, protected from the most lethal period of release.

Anyone trying to leave town soon discovered that police had set up roadblocks to stop anyone going into or out of the area. I can see no other justification than this being another measure taken to prevent rumours of the accident from spreading, since at this point only the isolated city’s residents and select Communist Party officials knew of it. Had the roadblocks merely prevented people from approaching the site for their own safety it would be fine, but people were unable to leave too. To prevent panic, officials provided no information about what had happened. This, of course, led to frantic speculation and many people tried to escape, avoiding roadblocks by walking out of town through the surrounding forest. Women were seen pushing prams with unprotected babies through the trees. This area later became known as the Red Forest, after its entire population of pine trees turned red and died from exposure caused by the first, deadliest cloud of particles blown from the reactor. It remains one of the most contaminated places on Earth.

By 2pm on the first day, troops from a special Army chemical unit had arrived at Kiev airport and began their journey to Chernobyl, where they took the first accurate measurements of surface-level radioactivity.179 The readings were extremely high and increasing all the time. By evening, reliable measurements were finally taken at the Chernobyl power station itself: thousands of roentgens per hour - a lethal dose within minutes. A few months later, radiation would be routinely measured at 240 points throughout the area, but for the time being there were no remote control-machines available for dosimetry, so humans were sent into the radiation fields.180 Similarly, there were no remote aircraft to take measurements in the atmosphere, so pilots deliberately flew through dangerous plumes to take readings.

Several leading members of the commission boarded a helicopter to view the plant from above and at last confirmed beyond doubt that Chernobyl’s reactor had been destroyed. A crisis meeting was held to discuss an appropriate response. None of the politicians understood the ramifications of what had happened, and wasted precious time with their own uninformed suggestions. After much frustrated debate, Legasov and his fellow scientists convinced them that this was not an accident they could sweep under the carpet - it would have significant, lasting, global consequences - nor one they could tackle with conventional firefighting methods. With limited options available, the group agreed their best course of action would be to drop bags of sand - mixed with boron, dolomite and lead to absorb neutrons, absorb the heat, and cool the fire, respectively - from helicopters hovering above the reactor, straight into the core. Tens of thousands of the heavy bags would be required.

Having resisted repeated requests to evacuate Pripyat and the surrounding area by Legasov since his arrival, Scherbina relinquished on the evening of the 26th, and agreed that the population within 10km of the plant should be moved to a safe distance. However, even this decision was tainted. While the scientists favoured immediate compulsory evacuation, Scherbina decided not to inform the city’s residents until late the following morning, leaving them unaware of the perils faced by venturing outside for another night and almost no time to prepare for the evacuation. 1,100 buses in a convoy drove overnight from Kiev to transport the evacuees out of the area. Officials forbade residents from leaving in their personal cars out of concern that they would cause traffic jams and prevent a steady departure.

On the morning of the 27th, as the radiation levels in Pripyat peaked, Legasov remarked that, “it was possible to see mothers pushing children in prams and children playing in the streets.181” To ensure as many residents as possible knew what was happening, people were recruited to travel around town, visiting each home with flyers. At 11am, the evacuation announcement was broadcast via radio around the city. It read: “For the attention of the residents of Pripyat! The City Council informs you that, due to the accident at Chernobyl Power Station in the city of Pripyat, the radioactive conditions in the vicinity are deteriorating. The Communist Party, its officials and the armed forces are taking necessary steps to combat this. Nevertheless, with the view to keep people as safe and healthy as possible, the children being top priority, we need to temporarily evacuate the citizens in the nearest towns of Kiev Oblast [an Oblast is another word for a State, Province or County, used in some parts of eastern Europe]. For these reasons, starting from April 27, 1986 at 2pm, each apartment block will be able to have a bus at its disposal, supervised by the police and the city officials. It is highly advisable to take your documents, some vital personal belongings and a certain amount of food, just in case, with you. The senior executives of public and industrial facilities of the city has decided on the list of employees needed to stay in Pripyat to maintain these facilities in a good working order. All the houses will be guarded by the police during the evacuation period. Comrade, leaving your residences temporarily please make sure you have turned off the lights, electrical equipment and water, and shut the windows. Please keep calm and orderly in the process of this short-term evacuation.182”

It was an incredibly misleading message. “I knew that the town had been evacuated forever,” wrote Legasov in his memoirs, two years later, “but I couldn’t find the moral strength to tell it to the people. Besides, if we told them that they were leaving forever, it would take them quite a while to pack their bags. The radiation levels were already very dangerous, so we told them it was a temporary move.183” I sympathise with Legasov’s plight, but that sounds a lot like an excuse to me. Had he claimed he didn’t want people hauling bags stuffed with radioactive heirlooms I may have accepted it, but to say it would have taken time to pack bags, when they had all morning, doesn’t ring true. No meaningful public warning of the dangers faced by remaining in Pripyat was given to enable a smooth evacuation, and there was no hint of a longer absence. Had they been informed of the long-term resettlement prospects, families could have packed everything needed to cope with the transition, and those with cars could have filtered out of town overnight. Instead, people were seen laughing and smiling as they boarded the buses, blissfully unaware they would never return to their homes. On the other hand, there were some residents who understood the gravity of what was happening - workers who understood what had occurred at the plant - and they packed accordingly, but those were few and far between. All dogs, cats and other family pets were left behind. Some were locked in their homes, others were set free; a few chased the fleeing buses. Despite a couple of isolated incidents where elderly people refused to leave or hid from their rescuers, the actual evacuation was remarkably efficient and took just over two hours.

Moscow ordered the exclusion zone’s initial radius of 10km from the plant expanded to 30km - an area of 2,800km² - six days later, after more extensive radiation readings revealed the severity of the contamination. This required those people who had only been moved a short distance to retreat a second time. In yet another attempt to preserve secrecy of the accident, the population of Pripyat and the nearby villages were only displaced up to about 60km, and were deposited with little organisation all over the surrounding villages and towns. There were reports of families being split up, of hosts refusing refugees entry to their homes, and even people given care of children who were not their own. Because they had been instructed to travel light, many evacuees took no money and no ID papers (vital for pretty much everything in the USSR), which caused additional problems down the line. Lots of people were unsurprisingly unsatisfied with remaining so close to the site of the accident, so they made their own way further afield. One helicopter pilot reported later that he, “could see huge crowds of lightly dressed people, women with children, old people, walking along the road and the roadside in the direction of Kiev.184” Later in May, there was a further evacuation from this 60km line for pregnant women and children after radiation levels continued to be dangerous, while towns as far away as 400km were similarly evacuated due to contaminated rainfall. In total, around 116,000 people were moved from 170 villages and towns during 1986.185 After 1986, a further 220,000 people from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus were relocated.186

The 129 men and women who were most heavily irradiated - firefighters, plant workers and one female security guard - were flown from Pripyat Hospital to Moscow’s famous Hospital Number 6, which specialises in treating radiation related illnesses. By the time they arrived, they were in a grave condition. The patients’ own families were forbidden from approaching them because their bodies emitted too much radiation, and existing patients who had occupied the same floor were moved to other parts of the building for protection.187 Even the staff became reluctant to approach them; “Many of the doctors and nurses in that hospital‚ and especially the orderlies‚ would get sick themselves and die. But we didn’t know that then,” says Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the wife of a deceased fireman, in Svetlana Alexievich’s haunting book, Voices From Chernobyl.188 Her book contains many haunting monologues. Ivan, a firefighter, remembers: “I woke up in the hospital in Moscow with 40 other fire fighters. At first we joked about radiation. Then we heard that a comrade had begun to bleed from his nose and mouth and his body turned black and he died. That was the end of the laughter.189” This may be a reference to Pravik, who was among the very first to die from exposure. When Hospital No. 6 ran out of room, Hospitals No. 7 and then No. 12 made space for the rest of the most seriously irradiated patients. Unfortunately, unlike with No. 6, no information was ever released about the patients who stayed in these other two hospitals.190

Lyudmilla Ignatenko recalls the aftermath in distressing detail: ‘“The doctors kept telling them they’d been poisoned by gas, for some reason. No one said anything about radiation... He started to change - every day I met a brand-new person. The burns started to come to the surface. In his mouth, on his tongue, his cheeks - at first there were little lesions, and then they grew... The other bio-chambers, where our boys were, were being tended to by soldiers because the orderlies on staff refused, they demanded protective clothing. The soldiers carried the sanitary vessels. They wiped the floors down, changed the bedding. They did everything. [They were soldiers from the same Army chemical division that took the first readings at Chernobyl - A.L.] But he-he-every day I would hear: Dead. Dead. Tischura is dead. Titenok is dead. Dead. He was producing stool twenty-five to thirty times a day. With blood and mucus. His skin started cracking on his arms and legs. He became covered with boils. When he turned his head, there’d be a clump of hair left on the pillow... At the morgue they said, “Want to see what we’ll dress him in?” I did! They dressed him up in formal wear, with his service cap. They couldn’t get shoes on him because his feet had swelled up. They had to cut up the formal wear, too, because they couldn’t get it on him, there wasn’t a whole body to put it on. The last two days in the hospital - pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his internal organs.191”’

Two months later she gave birth to his child. The baby girl only lived for 4 hours before dying of a congenital heart defect. She had cirrhosis of the liver after absorbing 28 roentgens from her father, one of the 29 people to die of acute radiation exposure.

The plant operators spent their remaining agonising weeks alive speculating over what had caused the explosion. “Every day, those who were recovering would gather in the smoking room of [Hospital] No. 6, and they were all tortured by one thing: why did the explosion occur?” recalled V. G. Smagin, Unit 4’s morning Shift Chief, who had arrived to relieve Akimov. “They thought about it and conjectured. They supposed that the explosive mixture of gases could have built up in the coolant drain tank of the emergency control system. A puff could have occurred, and the control rods shot out of the reactor. As a consequence, a prompt-neutron excursion. They also thought about the ‘tip’ effect of the control rods. If the formation of steam and the tip effect coincided - again a runaway reactor and explosion. At some point, they all gradually came to the idea of a burst of power.192”

The event especially tormented Akimov. Depressed and slowly, painfully, inexorably dying in hospital, he felt that he - as the man who pressed the button which lead to the explosion - was responsible, but could not understand why it had gone so wrong. His wife visited in him hospital the day before he died. “While he could still talk, he kept repeating to his father and mother that he had done everything right,” she said to Grigoriy Medvedev in ‘Chernobyl Notebook’. “This tortured him to the very end. [The last time I saw him], he could no longer speak. But there was pain in his eyes. I knew he was thinking about that damned night, he was re-enacting everything inside himself over and over again, and he could not see that he was to blame. He received a dose of 1,500 roentgens, perhaps even more, and he was doomed. He became blacker and blacker, and on the day he died he was as black as a negro. He was charred all over. He died with his eyes open.193” It was May 10th, a beautiful spring day. The others followed him in rapid succession: first the firefighters, then the operators who received the worst exposure. 26-year-old Leonid Toptunov died on the 14th. Dyatlov spent 6 months in hospital, but survived.194

Dr. Orlov, the 41-year-old second physician to arrive at Chernobyl, also spent his final days in Hospital Number 6. “When I first saw Orlov, he already bore signs of severe radiation sickness,” recalls Dr. Robert Gale in his book, ‘Chernobyl: The Final Warning’. Dr. Gale is an American who worked with Soviet doctors to save the most critical patients at Hospital Number 6. “Black herpes simplex blisters scarred his face and his gums were raw with a white lacy look, like Queen Anne’s lace, caused by candida infection. Then, over several days, the skin peeled away and his gums turned fire-engine red like raw beef. Ulcers spread across his body. The membranes lining his intestines eroded and he suffered bloody diarrhoea. We administered morphine to ease the pain, but even when delirious, he remained in agony. The nature of radiation burns is that they get worse rather than better, because old cells die and young ones are unable to reproduce as a result of the damage. Towards the end, Orlov was barely recognisable and his death several weeks after the disaster was merciful.195”

All told, approximately 100,000 people were examined in the days and weeks after the accident, 18,000 of whom required hospitalisation. It took the combined efforts of 1,200 doctors, 900 nurses, 3,000 physicians’ assistants and 700 medical students working in shifts to provide round the clock care.196

The world remained ignorant of the accident at Chernobyl until the morning of Monday April 28th (it’s April 28th as I’m writing this, strangely enough), when a sensor detected elevated radiation levels on engineer Cliff Robinson as he arrived for work at Sweden’s Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant, over 1,000 kilometers away. “My first thought was that a war had broken out and that somebody had blown up a nuclear bomb,” says Robinson. “It was a frightening experience, and of course we could not rule out that something had happened at Forsmark.197” After a partial evacuation of the plant’s 600 staff, those that remained urgently tried to locate the source of what they assumed was a leak somewhere on site. It became apparent from isotopes present in the air that the source was not a nuclear bomb, as was feared, but a reactor. The Swedish Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology analysed the trajectory of the radioactive particles in the atmosphere, which indicated that they were emanating from the southeast: The Soviet Union. Sweden’s Ambassador in Moscow telephoned the Soviet State Committee for the Use of Atomic Energy to ask what was happening, but was told they had no information for him. Further inquiries were made to other Ministries, but again the Soviet government claimed they had heard nothing about any accident. By the evening, monitoring stations in Finland and Norway had also detected the high radiation contents in the air.198

The cat was out of the bag, leaving the USSR’s leadership with little choice but to begrudgingly admit to the world that an accident had taken place. A brief, equivocate announcement on Radio Moscow revealed little: “An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. One of the atomic reactors has been damaged. Measures are being taken to liquidate the consequences of the accident. Those affected are being given aid and a Government commission of inquiry has been created.” The refusal to divulge any further details, other than a then-accurate but still disbelieved fatality count of two, caused rampant speculation in the Western world. United Press International printed a widely re-quoted figure of 2,000 dead from a dubious Kiev source who claimed to be close to rescue workers in the city: “Eighty people died immediately and some 2,000 people died on the way to hospitals.199” The New York Post, meanwhile, decided to one-up the hysteria by printing the ludicrous and provocative May 2nd headline, “Mass Grave for 15,000 N-Victims.200”

With Pripyat’s population out of harm’s way, concentration returned to extinguishing the reactor fire and preventing any further release of poisonous fission products from the core. Easier said than done, but the commission had the full backing of the Soviet government, meaning any and all resources were at their disposal. Helicopter pilots were withdrawn from the war in Afghanistan and set to work flying constant sorties over Unit 4, dropping sandbags into the molten crater. At first, only three men filled the bags with sand - two Deputy Ministers and Major General Antoshkin of the Air Force. “We were soon in a sweat,” recalled Gennadi Shasharin, Deputy Minister of Power and Electrification. “We worked just the way we were: Meshkov and I in Moscow suits and street shoes, and the General in his dress uniform. All without respirators and dosimeters.201” The first few dozen flight crews were soon too sick to continue working, having hovered 200m above the reactor in temperatures up to 200°C, dropping bags one by one by hand, and leaning out of the door to estimate the drop-point. The helicopter’s designers soon devised a clever system for dropping around 8 bags per flight by using a net hanging from beneath the fuselage, allowing them to release the whole payload via a lever in the cockpit.202

Sandbags caused the fire’s temperature to drop straight away, but radioactive particles in the air increased sharply because more and more dust and debris was kicked into the air from the heavy falling bags’ impact. After the first day, Major General Antoshkin proudly told Shcherbina that 150 tons had been dropped into the reactor. He responded, “150 tons of sand for a reactor like that is like a BB shot to an elephant.203” The General, taken aback, arranged for far more soldiers and pilots to be brought to the Exclusion Zone. These young pilots each flew many times over the reactor, and soon took to placing lead plates underneath their cockpit seats to minimise radiation exposure. Despite their homemade preventative measures, many pilots were fatally contaminated and died.

On April 28th, helicopters dumped 300 tons of sand into the reactor. On the 29th: 750 tons; on the 30th: 1,500 tons; on May 1st, May Day, a popular annual holiday in the Soviet Union: 1,900. In total, around 5,000 tons of materials fell into the reactor. By the evening of the 1st, the daily number was ordered to be halved, as there was a growing fear that the foundations wouldn’t hold under the strain of so much additional weight.204 If that happened, everything could collapse into the large pressure suppression pool (a water reservoir for the emergency cooling pumps, which doubles as a pressure suppression system, capable of condensing steam in case of a broken steam pipe) below. This, in turn, could trigger a steam explosion that, some Soviet physicists calculated, could vaporise the fuel in the three other reactors, flatten 200 square kilometers, contaminate a water supply used by 30 million people, and render northern Ukraine and southern Belarus uninhabitable.205

Putting out the fires around the plant had been an important first step towards bringing the situation under control, but the danger was far from over. It is now known that almost none of the neutron-absorbing boron mix in the sandbags made it into the core. The sandbags had, however, partially sealed the open gap between the slanted Upper Biological Shield and the reactor wall below. This was causing the fire to increase in temperature due to a reduction in heat exchange between the core and surrounding environment. The fire reached at least 2,250°C (the element ruthenium, which melts at that temperature, was detected in radioactive vapour that escaped the core), confirming that a meltdown was occurring.206 At the same time, the amount of fission products being dispersed into the atmosphere increased. Legasov’s sincere plan to save the plant, born out of a desperate need to do something, had succeeded only in making the situation worse.

A meltdown is when the core components (fuel, cladding, control rods etc.) of a reactor get so hot that they melt together and become a kind of radioactive magma. This can burn down through a containment vessel and potentially through the concrete foundations of the reactor building. If the molten core were to breach all containment and burn down to the water table in the earth below, there was a chance of triggering a colossal steam explosion, with results much the same as an explosion in the pressure suppression pool. Interestingly, modern Russian reactors have a safety feature designed specifically to deal with this eventuality: a solid pool of metallic alloy lying beneath the reactor. If a melting core breaches its containment vessel, the pool catches it and liquefies, creating currents that swirl the molten core against water-cooled steel walls to prevent it from burning through the foundations.

Running out of options fast, the government commission in charge of the emergency response began what they termed, “counting lives.207” It was abhorrent but inevitable that many, many lives would be lost during the fight to save Chernobyl, so Legasov, Scherbina and other members of the commission discussed their potential contingency plans in terms of how many people would die while carrying them out.

As I mentioned, the most immediate worry was that the reactor core could burn down through the lower biological shield to the pressure suppression pool below, and from there on to the building foundations. Two things were needed to minimise the risk. First, the pool had to be drained, but its two valves in the basement - which could only be turned by hand - were now submerged under radioactive water from the firemen’s failed attempt to extinguish the reactor fire. Second, the commission decided that the earth beneath the reactor building should be frozen with liquid nitrogen to harden the ground, support the foundations and help to cool the superheated core.

On May 6th, three incredibly courageous volunteers in wet suits dove into the flooded basement together208. The divers were Alexei Ananenko, a senior reactor mechanical engineer who knew the valves’ location, and two colleagues: Valery A Bezpalov, a turbine engineer who would turn the second valve, and Boris Alexandrovich Baranov, a shift supervisor who acted as a backup/rescuer in case of an emergency, and who also carried a flashlight. They were aware of the stakes and what radiation levels were like in the basement, but were apparently promised that their families would be well taken care of if they died.209 “When the searchlight beam fell on a pipe, we were joyous,” Ananenko told the Government-controlled news agency TASS, shortly after his return.210 “The pipe led to the valves.” Their light failed moments later and the poor men had to feel their way along the pipes in darkness. Once the valves were opened, “We heard the rush of water out of the tank. And in a few more minutes we were being embraced by the guys.” With the valves open, the pressure suppression pool was drained of its 3,200 tons of water, but all three heroic men were suffering from radiation sickness symptoms even as they emerged from the water, and each soon succumbed. Or so the tale211 goes.212

So what really happened, and what became of them? The basement entry, while dangerous, wasn’t quite as dramatic as modern myth would have you believe. The pressure suppression pool drainage valves couldn’t be reached because most watertight basement corridors and surrounding rooms were full of water. The solution required a team of highly trained firemen wearing respirators and rubber suits to charge their fire engines and the Chemical Troops’ protective, armoured vehicles into a loading bay beneath the reactor. There, they placed four special, ultra-long hoses into the water before retreating to the safety of Bryukhanov’s bunker beneath the administration building. After three hours of almost zero water movement, the dejected firemen came to the crushing realisation that one of the armoured vehicles must have driven over and severed their hoses. A fresh team brought twenty new hoses and re-entered the reactor building. They emerged an hour later, feeling exhausted and nauseous but triumphant; the replacement hoses were in place, the remaining radioactive water could finally be drained.213

Some water remained after the firemen’s draining mission, up to knee-height in most areas, but the route was passable. Runners took the first readings in several parts of the basement. There are one or two accounts from reliable sources that mention several others venturing into the basement, but their role is unclear. They may have been the aforementioned reconnaissance missions. It so happened that the firemen drained the basement as Ananenko and his two colleagues came on shift. Baranov was the most senior shift manager, so it was he who decided that Ananenko and Bezpalov should turn the valves, and he would accompany them as their observer/rescuer. The men entered the basement in wetsuits, radioactive water up to their knees in places, in a corridor stuffed with myriad pipes and valves. Each man carried two dosimeters: one strapped to the chest, the other near the ankle. When they entered the main basement corridor, Baranov remained near the entrance while Ananenko followed the pipe he believed to be for the pool. He was correct. His fears that he would not find the correct valve in a darkened maze of concrete and metal proved unfounded, so too was his concern that the valves would be jammed. The water drained away and the men returned to the light.

Folklore varies from death within hours to weeks to months, but TASS - the original source from the time - didn’t actually mention any health effects in their initial report. We know they probably suffered some ill health, mainly because of the nature of what they did, but also because of the general radiation situation at the plant as a whole. At the very least, all three were still alive on May 16th, when they were mentioned as being modest about their achievement.214

Alexei Ananenko is alive and well. He still works in the nuclear industry, and is involved with the activities at Chernobyl. I spoke with him in March 2016, albeit briefly. There is a patient named Baranov mentioned in Dr. Gale’s book, who is said to have died weeks after exposure. However, this is electrician Anatoly Ivanovich Baranov, who died on May 20th from acute radiation syndrome.215 Boris Baranov died of a heart attack in 2005, aged 65.216 As217 for Bespalov, there is very little mention of him. The only indication of whether he’s still alive is in a comments thread on a 2015 Russian blog post, where a user rejects the notion that the men died. Clearly not a concrete source, but it’s the only information I have. A rough translation reads: “I do not know where this information is from. Judging by the names and positions, Boris Baranov continued to work at Chernobyl and died in the two-thousands. Valery Bespalov retired from Chernobyl a few years ago, and a year ago he was alive for sure.218” Ananenko219 made a brief but powerful mention of him in his description of their ordeal. “Trying to recover those distant events, I called my friend Valery Bespalov and he told me about an episode that I do not remember, but which very well characterizes the then-situation at the plant. According to him, when we were on the way to the [basement] corridor, Baranov approached the entrance to [a corridor beneath the reactor]. He stopped, pushed the telescopic handle on the DP-5 radiometer to its full-length and stuck the sensor into the corridor. ‘I looked over my shoulder at Baranov’s readings,’ recalls Valery. ‘The device went off the scale on all sub-bands. Then followed a short command: “move very quickly.” Racing across the dangerous space, I could not resist. I looked back and saw a giant black lump, a fragment of the exploded reactor [fuel], mixed with concrete grit... In the mouth, there was a familiar metallic taste...’”220

That all three survived for so long after the event is quite a revelation, as the story of the divers who sacrificed their lives to save the plant is one of the most well-known legends to emerge from Chernobyl. Every English-language book, documentary and website I’ve ever seen that mentions them says they died.

On the same day, oil drilling equipment was set-up on the grounds and prepped to begin injecting liquid nitrogen into the earth beneath the foundations, but the requested nitrogen had been delayed by over 24 hours. Unsatisfied with the delay, the Deputy Chairman of the USSR’s Council of Ministers, Ivan Silayev, telephoned Bryukhanov and told him, “Find the nitrogen or you’ll be shot.221” He found it: the tanker frightened drivers were refusing to approach the area, but some military persuasion soon had them moving again, and the nitrogen began pumping before dawn.

Around this time, two senior figures from the International Atomic Energy Agency were invited to the plant. The Agency’s Swedish Director General Hans Blix and American Morris Rosen, head of its Nuclear Safety Department, flew to the site to speak with officials about the accident and the measures being undertaken to limit its consequences. Upon their return, they were questioned by correspondents from Germany’s Der Spiegel news magazine, to whom they gave unhelpful, blunt responses. “Can you tell whether the Soviet reactors are safer, or less safe, than the reactors in the West?” “They are a different type,” replied Rosen. “How strong was the radiation intensity?” “We did not ask.222”

On May 10th, the temperature and radioactive emissions from inside the reactor started to fall. By the 11th, days after the water finished draining, a team of technicians ventured into the sub-levels of the plant, bored a hole through a wall below the core and poked a radiometer through. It confirmed their worst fears: the molten core had cracked the reactor’s concrete foundations and at least partially poured into the basement. There was now next to nothing stopping it from breaking through the foundations of the building itself and reaching the water table below. A better and more permanent solution than injecting liquid nitrogen from the surface was required.

The very next day, delegates from Moscow visited mining towns around the USSR to recruit miners for an operation to cool the ground beneath the destroyed reactor. They were bussed to Chernobyl and began work on the 13th. One miner described the plan: “Our mission was this: dig a 150-meter tunnel, from the third block to the fourth. Then dig a room 30 meters long and 30 meters wide [and 2 meters tall] to hold a refrigeration device for cooling down the reactor.223” Scientists worried that pneumatic drills would stress the building’s fragile foundations, so the miners were ordered to dig their tunnel by hand. To limit exposure, they dug down 12 meters before heading towards Unit 4. The project took one month and four days, with miners digging 24 hours a day - in a normal mine, that distance would have taken three times as long. Due to the nature of the dig, it wasn’t possible to install ventilation holes, so there was a lack of oxygen and the temperature reached highs of 30°C.

Radiation levels inside the tunnel were around 1 roentgen per hour, but because the work was so cramped and demanding, the miners dug without any protective gear - not even their respirators, which became damp and useless within minutes. At the tunnel entrance, radiation reached highs of 300 roentgens-per-hour. The miners were never warned of the true extent of the danger, and every single one of them received a significant dose. Vladimir Amelkov, a miner who participated in the operation, said years later, “Someone had to go and do it. Us or someone else. We did our duty. Should we have done it? It’s too late to judge. I don’t regret anything.224” The miners achieved their goal of digging a room beneath Unit 4, but the refrigeration machinery was never installed because the core began to cool on its own. Instead, the space was filled with heat resistant concrete. While no official studies have ever been published, it’s estimated that one-quarter of the miners - who were all between 20 and 30 - died before they reached the age of 40.225 “The miners died for nothing,” laments Veniamin Prianichnikov, chief of the plant’s training programmes. “Everything we did was a waste of time.226”