![]() ![]() It was a weekend day everything was nice and quiet.”īumper cars stand in an abandoned amusement park in Prypiat, Ukraine, only a few kilometers from the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Our children’s cafeteria in a large shopping center was full of parents and children eating ice cream. “Just imagine,” recalled Aneliia Perkovskaia, a city official, “it was only an hour and a half before the evacuation. The radio repeated more or less the same announcement four times, but many still did not understand the seriousness of the situation. Please remain calm, organized and orderly.” Comrades, on leaving your dwellings, please do not forget to close windows, switch off electrical and gas appliances and turn off water taps. It is recommended that people take documents, absolutely necessary items and food products to meet immediate needs. For that purpose, buses will be provided to every residence today, April 27, beginning at 14:00 hours, under the supervision of police officers and representatives of the city executive committee. In order to ensure complete safety for residents, children first and foremost, it has become necessary to carry out a temporary evacuation of the city’s residents to nearby settlements of Kyiv oblast. “In connection with the accident at the Chernobyl atomic power station, unfavorable radiation conditions are developing in the city of Prypiat. “Attention! Attention!” came the calm voice of a female announcer speaking Russian with a strong Ukrainian accent. Children returned from school, where they had been given iodine tablets, and were advised to stay indoors. The police and military were wearing respirators and gas masks. In the afternoon military personnel carriers appeared on the streets, and military planes and helicopters filled the sky. They had to turn back to the city, where Liudmila saw foam on the streets-roads were being treated with a special solution by water trucks. Liudmila Kharitonova, a senior engineer in a construction firm, was on her way to her country house nearby when she and her family were stopped by police. The city of Prypiat was slowly awakening to the reality of the disastrous accident in its backyard. “I got in touch with my neighbors and close friends right away, but they had already ‘packed their bags’ that night: A close friend had called and told them about the accident.” “Our dentist friend said that they had all been awakened at night because of an emergency and summoned to the clinic, to which people from the station were taken all night.” Romanchenko decided to share the news with her own friends and family. Lidia Romanchenko, an employee of a Chernobyl construction firm, recalled: “Some time around eight in the morning a neighbor called me and said that her neighbor had not returned from the station an accident had taken place there.” That information was soon confirmed by another source. And the atmosphere was radioactive,” remembered Abegian. “I told him that children were running in the streets people were hanging laundered linen out to dry. Abagian had just returned from the plant, where the explosions in the reactor had caught him unawares-he and his colleagues had had to seek shelter under a metal bridge. Radiation levels increased on the city plaza in front of party headquarters in downtown Prypiat, rising from 40 to 320-330 microroentgens (a legacy unit measuring exposure to electromagnetic radiation) per second, or 1.2 roentgens per hour.Īrmen Abagian, the director of one of the Moscow nuclear-power research institutes who had been dispatched to Prypiat as a member of the government commission, approached Shcherbina and demanded the city be evacuated. The wind suddenly picked up, driving radioactive clouds northward from the damaged reactor and covering parts of the city. The explosion might be the first indication of a much bigger blast to come: They had no choice but to wait and see.īut even without further explosions, the newest ones put Prypiat citizens in greater danger. It looked as if the worst-case scenario was now coming to pass.Įarlier in the day, experts had predicted a possible chain reaction starting as soon as the reactor emerged from the temporarily disabling iodine well. “It was a striking spectacle,” remembered one of the commission’s experts who observed the scene from the third floor of the Prypiat party headquarters, where the high commission was housed. Three powerful explosions illuminated the dark red sky above the damaged reactor, sending red-hot pieces of fuel rods and graphite into the air. Soon after 9:00 p.m., while the members of the commission were brainstorming, the reactor suddenly awakened. ![]()
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