And from somewhere in the heart of the tangled mass of rebar and shattered concrete—from deep inside the ruins of Unit Four, where the reactor was supposed to be—Alexander Yuvchenko could see something more frightening still: a shimmering pillar of ethereal blue-white light, reaching straight up into the night sky, disappearing into infinity. Delicate and strange and encircled by a flickering spectrum of colors conjured by flames from within the burning building and superheated chunks of metal and machinery, the beautiful phosphorescence transfixed Yuvchenko for a few seconds. Then Tregub yanked him back around the corner and out of immediate danger: the phenomenon that had entranced the young engineer was created by the radioactive ionization of air and was an almost certain sign of an unshielded nuclear reactor open to the atmosphere.
* * *
As the three trucks from Fire Station Number Two drew up beside Unit Four, a fire prevention officer from the plant came running out to meet them. He had witnessed the explosion and called in the alarm. Anatoly Zakharov jumped down from his cab and looked around. The ground was littered with blocks of graphite, many of them still glowing red with intense heat. Zakharov had watched the reactor being constructed from the inside out and knew exactly what they were.
“Tolik, what is it?” one of the men asked.
“Lads, it’s the guts of the reactor,” he said. “If we survive until the morning, we’ll live forever.”
Pravik told Zakharov to stay by the radio and await instructions. He and squad commander Leonid Shavrey would conduct a reconnaissance to establish the source of the fire. “And then we’ll put it out,” Pravik said.
With that, the young lieutenant disappeared into the plant.
Inside the turbine hall of Unit Four, the two firemen found a scene of total chaos. Broken glass, concrete, and pieces of metal lay everywhere; a few dazed operators ran here and there through the smoke that rose from the rubble; the walls of the building trembled, and from somewhere above came the roar of escaping steam. The windows along row A had been shattered, and the lights above Turbine Number Seven were blown out; jets of steam and hot water blasted from the ruptured flange of a feed pipeline, and flashes of flame were visible through clouds of steam in the area of the fuel pumps. Some of the roof had caved in, and heavy pieces of debris—hurled out of the reactor building and onto the roof of the hall by the explosion—were still falling from above. At one point, a lead plug that had been used to close a reactor channel tumbled from the ceiling and smashed into the ground within a meter of where one of the turbine operators stood.
Pravik and Shavrey, mere firefighters, had no equipment to measure radiation. Their walkie-talkies weren’t working. They found a telephone and tried to call the power station dispatcher to find out more details of the emergency. They couldn’t get through. For the next fifteen minutes, the two men ran around inside the plant. But they were unable to establish anything for certain, except that parts of the turbine hall roof had collapsed, and the areas that hadn’t seemed to be on fire.
By the time Pravik and Shavrey returned to their men outside Unit Three, the firefighters of the Pripyat city brigade had arrived. By two in the morning, the men of seventeen other fire brigades from all over the Kiev region were racing to the plant, accompanied by search-and-rescue teams, special ladder crews, and tanker trucks. Soon afterward, the chief of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Kiev established a crisis center dedicated to the emergency and called for updates from the scene every forty minutes.
In his apartment across the street from the Pripyat police station, Piotr Khmel, chief of the first watch of Paramilitary Brigade Number Two, was ready to turn in after his long night of drinking when his doorbell rang. It was Radchenko, a driver from the station house.
“There’s a fire in Unit Four,” he said. Every man was needed at once. Khmel told him to wait while he put on his uniform, then followed him downstairs to the UAZ jeep waiting on the street. On his way out, the young lieutenant snatched the half-empty bottle of Sovietskoe shampanskoye from the kitchen table. As the UAZ yawed into the sharp left-hand bend on Lesi Ukrainki Street, Khmel held tight to the bottle. He drained it to the dregs.
Whatever the emergency, there was no need to waste good Soviet champagne.
* * *
In his flat on Lenina Prospekt, plant director Viktor Brukhanov was woken by the telephone within two minutes of the explosion. Beside him in bed, his wife stirred and looked up as the light snapped on. Calls from the station in the middle of the night were not unusual, so she felt no need to be alarmed. But now, as her husband listened in silence to what he was being told, Valentina watched the color drain from his face. Viktor put down the receiver, dressed in a trance, and slipped out into the night without saying another word.
It was not yet 2:00 a.m. when Brukhanov reached the plant. He saw the jagged outline of Unit Four, lit from within by a dim red glow, and knew that the worst had happened.
I’m going to prison, he thought.
Heading into the main administrative building, the director ordered the plant’s chief of civil defense to open up the emergency bunker in the basement below. Designed as a refuge for the staff in the event of a nuclear attack, the hardened bunker contained a crisis center with desks and telephones for each of the plant’s department heads, decontamination showers, an infirmary for the injured, air filters to scrub poison gas and radionuclides from the atmosphere, a diesel generator, and tanks of fresh water intended to support 1,500 people for a minimum of three days—all sealed behind a steel airlock door. Brukhanov went upstairs to his office on the third floor and tried to raise the chief shift manager of the plant on the phone. There was no reply. He ordered the activation of the automatic telephone alert system, designed to notify all senior personnel of an emergency of the highest degree: a General Radiation Accident. This indicated the release of radioactivity not only within the station but also onto the grounds and into the air surrounding it.
The mayor of Pripyat arrived, accompanied by the plant’s resident KGB major and the Party secretaries of both the plant and the city. The apparatchiks had many difficult questions. The director, expected to provide answers, had none.
The bunker was a long, narrow space with a low ceiling, cluttered with tables and chairs, which filled quickly with the department heads summoned by the phone alert. Brukhanov took a seat right beside the door, at a desk equipped with several telephones and a small control panel, and began reporting the news of an accident to his superiors. First, he called Moscow, where he spoke to his boss at the USSR’s atomic energy authority, Soyuzatomenergo; then he called the first and second secretaries of the Party in Kiev. “There’s been a collapse,” he said. “But it’s not clear what happened. Dyatlov is looking into it.” Then he informed the Ukrainian Energy Ministry and the director of the Kiev region power supply utility.
Soon afterward, the director took the first damage reports from the head of plant radiation safety and the chief shift supervisor: there had been an explosion in Unit Four, but they were attempting to supply cooling water to it. Brukhanov heard that the instrument readings in the control room still showed coolant levels stuck at zero. He feared that they stood on the precipice of the most terrifying catastrophe imaginable: the reactor running dry of water. Nobody suggested to him that the reactor had already been destroyed.
There were soon thirty or forty men in the bunker. The ventilation fans hummed; pandemonium reigned. The hubbub of dozens of simultaneous telephone conversations—the supervisors of every department of the V. I. Lenin nuclear power plant calling their employees, all focused on ensuring a supply of water and getting it pumping to the core of Reactor Number Four—reverberated from the hardened concrete walls. Yet at his desk by the door, Brukhanov seemed stunned: his formerly laconic manner sagged into a dejected stupor, his movements slow and numbed by shock.
* * *
After witnessing the horror of the destruction of Unit Four from the outside, Alexander Yuvchenko and Yuri Tregub r
an back into the plant to report what they had seen. But before they could reach the control room, they were stopped by Yuvchenko’s immediate boss, Valery Perevozchenko, the supervisor of the reactor section on their shift. With him were the two trainees who had been sent by Deputy Chief Engineer Dyatlov to lower the reactor control rods by hand. When Perevozchenko explained their instructions, Yuvchenko tried to tell them that their mission was senseless: the control rods—indeed, the reactor itself—no longer existed. But Perevozchenko insisted. Yuvchenko had only examined the reactor from below, he said; they needed to assess the damage from above.
While Tregub continued on to the control room, Yuvchenko agreed to help find a way to the reactor hall. Orders were orders—and besides, Yuvchenko was the only one with a flashlight. Together the four men picked their way up the stairs from mark +12 toward mark +35. Yuvchenko was last in line as they wound through a labyrinth of collapsed walls and twisted wreckage, until they reached the massive airlock door of the reactor hall. Made of steel and filled with concrete, the door weighed several tonnes, but the crank mechanism used to hold it open had been damaged in the explosion. If they went into the hall and the door swung shut behind them, they would be trapped. So Yuvchenko agreed to stay outside. He braced his shoulder against the door, using all his strength to keep it from closing, while his three colleagues stepped over the threshold.
Inside, there wasn’t much room. Perevozchenko stood on a narrow ledge and swept the darkness with Yuvchenko’s flashlight. Its yellow beam caught the outlines of the gigantic steel disc of Elena tilted in the air, balanced on the edges of the reactor vault; the hundreds of narrow steam tubes that ran through it had been shorn away in ragged clumps, like the hair of a mutilated doll. The control rods were long gone. As they gazed at the molten crater beneath, the three men realized in horror that they were staring directly into the active zone: the blazing throat of the reactor.
Perevozchenko, Proskuryakov, and Kudryavtsev remained on the ledge for only as long as Yuvchenko held the door: a minute at most. But even that was too long. All three received a fatal dose of radiation in a matter of seconds.
Even as his three colleagues staggered back into the corridor in shock, Yuvchenko wanted to have a look for himself. But Perevozchenko, a veteran of the nuclear submarine fleet, who knew very well what had just happened, shoved the younger man aside. The door slammed shut.
“There’s nothing to see here,” he said. “Let’s go.”
* * *
In the darkness of the turbine hall, Deputy Section Chief Razim Davletbayev battled to contain the chaos sweeping his department. Standing emergency regulations dictated that the plant operators, not the fire brigade, fight any fires inside their part of the station, and the blazes now raging across the multiple levels of the turbine section threatened an even greater catastrophe. The turbine machinery was filled with thousands of liters of highly flammable oil, and the turbine generators with hydrogen—which in normal operation was necessary to cool the generator coils. If either ignited, the resulting fire could spread down the almost one-kilometer length of the turbine hall to engulf the plant’s other three reactors or lead to yet another massive explosion inside Unit Four.
Amid the radioactive steam and fountains of boiling water pouring from broken pipes, and sparks showering from severed cables, Davletbayev ordered his men to turn on the sprinklers covering Turbine Number Seven, drain lubricant into emergency tanks, and stem a jet of oil spewing from a broken line on mark +5; a slick was spreading across the floor at level 0 and running into the basement. A team of three engineers fought their way inside the rooms housing the oil feed pump controls, which were flooded with hot water, to turn them off and prevent the fire from spreading. Two machinists extinguished one blaze on level +5, while others fought fires elsewhere. The chief mechanic cut off the pumps from the deaerators, blocking a flow of radioactive water from broken pipes into the turbine room.
Inside the hall, it was hard to breathe, and the humid, steam-saturated air carried the smell of ozone. But the operators gave little thought to radiation, and the panicked dosimetrists who dashed through the unit provided no useful information: the needles of all their monitoring equipment simply ran off the scale. The radiometers capable of taking higher readings remained locked in a safe and could not be released without orders from above. Razim Davletbayev told himself that the distinctive scent filling the turbine hall was caused by the short circuits arcing in the air; later, when he began to feel sick, although he understood that nausea was an early warning of radiation poisoning, he still preferred to put it down to the potassium iodide solution he’d drunk.
Turbine engineer Yuri Korneyev was busy shutting down Turbine Number Eight when Anatoly Baranov, the shift electrician, ran in. Baranov began displacing the hydrogen in both Number Seven and Number Eight turbine generators with nitrogen, averting the possibility of a further explosion. By the time they had finished, an eerie silence had fallen around them and their lifeless machinery. They stepped outside onto a small balcony, to smoke. Only much later did they discover the cost of their cigarette break: the street beneath them was scattered with blocks of reactor graphite, which irradiated them as they rested at the railing.
Elsewhere, the engineers had begun to comb the rubble for the bodies of the dead or injured. The machinists on the floor of the turbine hall had all escaped apparently unscathed from the initial explosion, but after a half hour, Vladimir Shashenok, who had been monitoring the turbine test from compartment 604—the flowmeter room—was still missing. So three men picked their way across piles of debris to the compartment, on an upper landing across from the turbine hall, inside the walls of the reactor building. Their path was strewn with wreckage; they dodged bursts of escaping steam; they waded ankle-deep in water. When they finally reached compartment 604, they discovered that it had been obliterated. Concrete wall panels had been tossed into the street by the explosion. Darkness and swirling dust swallowed the beam of their flashlight. They began calling out to Shashenok in the blackness but heard no response. Eventually they came upon a body: lying unconscious on his side, a bloody foam bubbling from his mouth. They picked Shashenok up by the armpits and carried him out.
* * *
Outside, Lieutenant Pravik of Paramilitary Fire Brigade Number Two mounted the fire escape that zigzagged up the northern wall of Unit Three, his boots ringing on the metal treads. A handful of men from the Pripyat brigade accompanied him, including their commander, Lieutenant Viktor Kibenok, and Vasily Ignatenko, a stocky twenty-five-year-old renowned as the champion athlete of Brigade Number Six. Around them they heard only the hum of the plant’s remaining three reactors and the crackling of flames.
It was a long way to the top. The flat roofs of Unit Three and its doomed twin were staggered like giant steps. The eight levels of the buildings formed a concrete ziggurat that reached its summit with the top of the ventilation block—twenty stories high and crowned by the red-and-white-striped chimney that towered over the two reactors. From here, the firemen could look straight down into the glowing ruins of the Unit Four reactor hall and glimpse the destruction beyond. Dozens of small fires had broken out on the roofs around them: at the foot of the chimney; on the reactor hall of Unit Three; and, far off in the darkness, on top of the turbine hall. Ignited by fragments of blazing debris thrown from the reactor by the explosion, some of the fires burned fiercely, with flames reaching a meter and a half into the air; others were smaller but strangely incandescent, fizzing and crackling like sparklers. The air was filled with black smoke, but also something else that the firefighters did not recognize: a strange vapor that looked almost like fog but gave off a peculiar smell.
In the darkness around their feet were hundreds of sources of lethal ionizing radiation: lumps of graphite, fragments of fuel assemblies, and pellets of the reactor’s uranium dioxide fuel itself, scattered across the rooftops and emitting fields of gamma rays reaching thousands of roentgen an hour.
Yet Pra
vik and the others were driven on by a more tangible threat: the fires on the roof of Unit Three, directly above the reactor. A breeze was blowing from the west, threatening to spread any one of the small blazes downwind toward reactors Two and One, both of which were still running. If these fires weren’t brought under control, the entire station would soon be engulfed in disaster. Pravik moved quickly. Together with Kibenok and his men, they brought hoses to the roof. Pravik ordered his pump trucks connected to the dry standpipes designed to distribute water to the heights of the building through the plant’s fire suppression system. But when the pumps were turned on, air whistled through the hoses.
“Give me some pressure!” Pravik yelled over the radio. It was no use: the standpipes had been smashed in the explosion.
For once, even the quarrelsome men of the third watch didn’t hesitate to follow orders. Sweating in their heavy canvas uniforms and rubber jackets, they ran out more hoses just as they had been trained to do—five in seventeen seconds. They threw them over their shoulders, dragged them up the staircases, and poured foam onto the roof of Unit Three. Kibenok had a separate line connected to the Pripyat brigade’s big Ural fire tanker, which could move forty liters of water a second. Even then, the handful of men on the roof struggled to extinguish even the smallest blazes, caused by materials which seemed to burn more savagely when they poured water on them. These were almost certainly pellets of uranium dioxide, which, superheated to more than 4,000 degrees Celsius before the explosion, had ignited on contact with the air; when hosed with water, the resulting reaction released oxygen, explosive hydrogen, and radioactive steam.
Midnight in Chernobyl Page 12