The Liquidators of Chernobyl

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At 1:23am on Saturday, April 26th, 1986, a failed experiment blew the 500-ton safety cap off of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant's Reactor Number 4. According to Sasha Yuvchenko, a member of the night shift at Chernobyl, the building's thick concrete walls [quote] "were bent like rubber." Further recalling the event for the Guardian newspaper in 2004, Yuvchenko said, "There was no ceiling, only sky; a sky full of stars." Ionization radiation shot into the air like a blue laser beam as the core of the nuclear reactor was exposed to the world. He remembered, [quote] "thinking how beautiful it was."

Despite trying to hide the failure from the world, the sheer magnitude of the disaster soon called for a massive response force to be formed to deal with the fallout. Officials hastily assembled an army made up of firefighters, pilots, miners, and local volunteers. Their long list of tasks included removing the irradiated debris from around the reactor, constructing a sarcophagus which would entomb the destroyed reactor, wide-scale decontamination, road building, and the destruction and burial of contaminated buildings, forests and equipment, not to mention animals both wild and domesticated.

To say that theirs was a mammoth task is an understatement. It was a clean-up effort that would span for three years following the disaster and put many of the first responders in mortal danger. While some in their ranks were forced by their superiors and Communist Party officials to work at Chernobyl by means of direct orders, many thousands more actually volunteered to participate in the Chernobyl clean-up. Many even extended their work in the zone beyond the initial compulsory term.

These workers were called “Liquidators.”

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