Pripyat, now in Ukraine, was founded in 1970 and became the ninth ‘nuclear city’ of the Soviet Union.
As in other towns with that name, the lives of 50,000 inhabitants of Pripyat it revolved around a nuclear facility; in this case, of the Nuclear Power Station Vladimir Ilich Lenin, also known as Chernobyl.
At 1:23 am Saturday April 26, 1986, an unexpected spike in the electrical fluid during test emergency systems produced a series of explosions at reactor No. 4 of the nuclear station, which destroyed the roof of the building that contained and released a column of highly radioactive steam, which spread to nearly a kilometer high . It was the beginning of the biggest in the history of humanity industrial accident.
Not knowing yet what had caused, members of the fire department of Pripyat came to fight the fire that consumed the building.
Around 5. m., after pouring tons of water on the structure, the fire outside the building was controlled. What they did not know these men is that they were exposed to lethal doses of radiation.
Although the initial explosion just took the life of one of the plant workers, 32 people involved in the immediate response they died victims of acute radiation poisoning, some hours just after exposure.
they are many of the more than 500,000 workers over the next seven months faced the delicate task of stabilizing the reactor added.
No news of the accident, that day began like any other for the inhabitants of Pripyat. But within hours they began to register strong headaches and metallic taste in the mouth, followed by uncontrollable coughing and vomiting. But only on April 27, more than 24 hours after the accident, the evacuation of the city was ordered
Around 11 a.. m., more than a thousand buses were distributed in the streets of Pripyat and Army personnel gave the order to the people to close their homes and prepare necessary belongings to leave the city at 2 pm.
to avoid panic no information about the accident spread and insisted that it was a temporary evacuation. However, residents in a radius of 30 kilometers around the nuclear plant were leaving their homes forever.
Radioactive cloud
Meanwhile, a flotilla of helicopters trying to contain the radioactive material released by the reactor spewing tons of bags of sand, lead and boric acid over the hole in the roof of the building.
the TV cameras recorded the first images of the damage caused by explosion, but the real threat posed by the tons of radioactive material released into the atmosphere was invisible to the eye and was still unknown outside the Soviet Union.
on the morning of April 28, workers Nuclear Power Plant Forsmark in Sweden, more than a thousand kilometers from Chernobyl, began to record high levels of radiation during a routine control.
After discarding a local flight, a commission from the Swedish Government formed by physical nuclear, meteorologists, experts reactors and even fighter pilots who flew their planes through the radioactive cloud, concluded independently that a serious incident had occurred in the Chernobyl reactor.
When the Soviet Union recognized the severity of the accident, 200 tonnes of radioactive magma, more than 1,200 degrees Celsius, piercing the base of the reactor number 4 at Chernobyl and threatened to cause an explosion with the potential to leave much of it uninhabitable Europe.
JUAN DIEGO SOLER * Special
for
* Research Service Astrophysics Atomic Energy Commission and Energy alternatives (France) TIME. @juandiegosoler
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