His last words were "Lyusya! Lyusenka!" "She's just stepped away for a bit, she'll be right back," the nurse told him. He was still in his bio-chamber, they hadn't taken him away yet. Then I came to: I'll see him one more time! Once more! I run down the stairs. I was gone for three hours! I came up to the window and started shouting: "Why? Why?" I looked up at the sky and yelled. "How is he?" "He died fifteen minutes ago." What? I was there all night. I came back from the cemetery and called the nurse's post right away. Our husbands are so handsome! And happy! It was the last day of that life. There's a photo of us all in the building the day before the explosion. "Go! Run to him! He's calling for you like mad!" That morning Tanya Kibenok pleaded with me: "Come to the cemetery, I can't go there alone." They were burying Vitya Kibenok and Volodya Pravik. I just walk to the dorm, go up to my room, lie down on the floor, I couldn't lie on the bed, everything hurt too much, when already the cleaning lady is knocking. At eight I say: "Vasenka, I'm going for a little walk." He opens his eyes and closes them, lets me go. I'm sitting on my little chair next to him at night. Lyudmilla Ignatenko, wife of deceased fireman Vasily Ignatenko We hear some of their stories: those living with illness and fear, and those sent in to clean up the mess and monitor the damage. The memories of survivors were collected for the 10th anniversary of the disaster in the book Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of the Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich. Finally, nearly three days after the explosion, the Soviet news agency TASS issued a brief statement acknowledging that an accident had occurred. Then monitoring stations in Scandinavia began reporting abnormally high levels of radioactivity. There was no word from the Kremlin that the worst nuclear accident in history was under way. The cloud moved on to the north and west, contaminating land in neighboring Belarus, then moved across Eastern Europe and over Scandinavia.įrom the Soviets: utter silence. The resulting radioactive plume blanketed the nearby city of Pripyat. A power surge ruptured the uranium fuel rods, while a steam explosion created a huge fireball that blew the roof off the reactor. Twenty years ago this month, a routine maintenance test at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in northern Ukraine veered wildly out of control.Īt 1:23 in the morning on April 26, 1986, there was a disastrous chain reaction in the core of reactor No.4. At Chernobyl, Building a Shelter for a Shelter April 21, 2006
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