Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  Down on the ground, twenty-four-year-old Sergeant Alexander Petrovsky was ordered to take two men up to the top of the ventilation block and help out. While still a teenager, Petrovsky had been part of a fifteen-man welding crew building Units Three and Four. He had helped construct both reactors and knew every room in the complex, from the basement cable tunnels to the roof. In those days, there had always been some radiation around, and it had never been a problem. He wasn’t concerned about catching a bit more.

  But Petrovsky had reached only the first level of the roofs—halfway up, at mark +30—when he saw Lieutenant Pravik and the men from the Pripyat brigade coming down toward him. Something terrible had clearly happened to them: staggering and incoherent, the half dozen men were pulling and dragging one another down the staircase, vomiting as they came. Petrovsky told one of his men to get them safely to the ground, while he continued upward with Ivan Shavrey—one of the two Belarusian brothers on the third watch. In his haste to reach the top and help the comrades they imagined still fighting the blazes at mark +71, Shavrey slipped on the steep staircase, and Petrovsky reached out to grab him. As he did so, Petrovsky felt his borrowed service cap slip off his head. He watched helplessly as it tumbled away into the darkness, and went on bareheaded, protected by only his shirt and waterproof jacket.

  When they reached the summit, the two firefighters discovered they were alone on the roof. Only a single functioning hose remained. Between them, they began extinguishing what they could. Working around the base of the vent stack, they trained the hose on burning chunks of graphite but found that even when the flames went out, the material gave off an incandescence that no amount of water could douse. After thirty minutes, almost every visible fire around them was out, but one major problem remained: flames were licking from the end of a two-meter ventilation pipe projecting vertically from the roof. There wasn’t enough pressure to shoot a jet of water up into it, and Petrovsky was too short to reach directly into the end of the pipe with the hose. But Shavrey was a head taller. It was just as he was passing the heavy cast aluminum nozzle to Shavrey that Sergeant Petrovsky abruptly went blind.

  A fatal dose of radiation is estimated at around 500 rem—roentgen equivalent man—or the amount absorbed by the average human body when exposed to a field of 500 roentgen per hour for sixty minutes. In some places on the roof of Unit Three, lumps of uranium fuel and graphite were emitting gamma and neutron radiation at a rate of 3,000 roentgen an hour. In others, levels may have reached more than 8,000 roentgen an hour: there, a man would absorb a lethal dose in less than four minutes.

  Petrovsky’s loss of vision was sudden and total and endured for only thirty seconds. But it seemed to last an eternity and filled him with terror. When his eyesight returned as unexpectedly as it had left, the sergeant’s courage had deserted him. “Fuck this, Vanya!” he shouted to Shavrey. “Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

  On the other side of the complex, Ivan Shavrey’s older brother, Leonid, had been fighting the fires on the roof of the turbine hall. There, down at mark +31.5, flying pieces of debris had smashed gaping holes in the corrugated steel. Some roof panels had collapsed completely into the hall beneath, while others dangled treacherously underfoot, leaving a patchwork of voids almost invisible in the darkness. The heat was so intense that the bitumen surface melted underfoot, tugging at the firemen’s boots, making walking difficult. The first men to arrive could not reach all the fires with hoses but inched around the holes to smother them with sand instead.

  Descending to the ground for another hose, Leonid Shavrey found that the brigade chief, Major Leonid P. Telyatnikov, had arrived to take command. The major told Shavrey to return to the turbine hall roof and, once all the remaining small blazes had been extinguished, maintain a fire watch until relieved. And it was here that, at a few minutes past three in the morning, Lieutenant Piotr Khmel—still drunk on the People’s Champagne—joined Shavrey to maintain a silent lookout for new blazes. Together, amid a field of tangled hoses and radioactive debris, the two men stood and waited for dawn.

  * * *

  In the bunker beneath the administrative block, Director Brukhanov and his senior staff worked the telephones, still struggling to believe what was happening in the world above them. They labored mechanically, punch-drunk from the mounting strain—but could not overcome the power of their faith that a nuclear reactor would never explode. Although by now, many of them had seen for themselves the scale of destruction that surrounded Unit Four, they remained unable—or unwilling—to comprehend the truth. Brukhanov made his own trip to Unit Four, but when he returned to the bunker, he still refused to confront the implications of what he’d seen. He chose to believe instead that the reactor remained intact and that an explosion had taken place elsewhere—in a steam separator drum or perhaps in the turbine oil tank. As long as his men kept feeding water to Reactor Number Four, to head off the possibility of a meltdown, a true catastrophe would be averted.

  Yet not everyone had succumbed to wishful thinking and self-delusion. The plant’s civil defense chief, Serafim Vorobyev, arrived in the bunker shortly after two in the morning. The first thing he did was remove a powerful DP-5 military radiometer from storage and turn it on. A bulky Bakelite box with a steel detecting wand at the end of a long cable, the DP-5 was designed for use after a nuclear attack, and, unlike the sensitive Geiger counters used by the power station’s dosimetrists to monitor workplace safety, it could detect intense gamma radiation fields of up to 200 roentgen per hour. Obliged by regulations to report to the local authorities any accident that resulted in a release of radiation beyond the boundaries of the power station, Vorobyev went up to ground level to take measurements. He’d reached only as far as the bus stop outside the front doors when he took a reading of 150 milliroentgen per hour—more than a hundred times higher than normal. He rushed back to tell Brukhanov to warn the plant staff and the population of Pripyat.

  “Viktor Petrovich,” he said, “we need to make an announcement.”

  But the director told him to wait. He wanted more time to think. So Vorobyev went back outside and got into his car to gather more data. As he drove around the plant toward Unit Four, the needle on the DP-5 swung up to 20 roentgen per hour. When he passed the electrical substations, it hit 100 r/h and kept going: 120; 150; 175; finally, passing 200 r/h, the needle went off the scale. Vorobyev now had no idea how high the true levels of radiation around the plant were but knew that they must be enormous. He drove right up to the mountain of debris cascading from the shattered northern wall of the reactor and saw the black trail of graphite leading away into the darkness. Less than a hundred meters away, the first operators were being led out of the plant to a waiting ambulance, oddly excitable, complaining of headaches and nausea or already vomiting.

  Vorobyev drove back to the bunker and reported to Brukhanov the most conservative reasonable dosimetry estimate: the station was now surrounded by very high fields of radiation, of up to 200 r/h. It was essential, he said, to warn the people of Pripyat about what had happened. “We need to tell people that there’s been a radiation accident, that they should take protective measures: close the windows and stay inside,” Vorobyev told the director.

  But still Brukhanov stalled. He said he would wait for Korobeynikov, head of the plant’s radiation safety team, to make his own assessment. At 3:00 a.m., Brukhanov called his Party boss in Moscow and the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Kiev with a situation report. He described an explosion and a partial collapse of the turbine hall roof. The radiation situation, he said, was being clarified.

  It was another hour before the chief of radiation safety arrived. Vorobyev stood by and listened to the man’s report in disbelief: his measurements revealed that radiation levels were indeed elevated, but they were a mere 13 microroentgen an hour. He claimed to already have performed a rough analysis and found that the radionuclides in the air were principally noble gases, which would quickly dissipate and therefore posed little threat
to the population; there really wasn’t much to be concerned about. This assessment was apparently what Brukhanov had been hoping to hear. He stood and, looking around the room, declared darkly, “Some people here understand nothing and are stoking panic.” He left no doubt whom he was talking about.

  Yet Vorobyev knew that it was simply impossible to approach the station from any direction without passing through radiation fields tens of thousands of times higher than the radiation safety team reported. Every word he’d just heard must therefore be a lie—but his confidence in his own expertise and equipment had been shaken.

  Taking the DP-5, Vorobyev went out into the night for a third time to verify his results. Tendrils of amber light were spreading across the sky as he drove toward Pripyat. There, he found a police roadblock, a crowd of people waiting in the open for a bus to Kiev, and hot spots of fallout on the asphalt: levels of gamma radiation rose by thousands of times in the space of a few meters. By the time he returned to the plant from the city, Vorobyev’s car and clothes were both so contaminated that the DP-5 could no longer take accurate readings. He clattered down the concrete steps of the bunker on the verge of hysteria, a wild look in his eyes.

  “There’s no mistake,” he told Brukhanov. “We must take action as the plan demands.”

  But the director cut him off. “Get out,” he said and pushed him away. “Your instrument is broken. Get out of here!”

  In desperation, Vorobyev picked up the phone to notify the Ukrainian and Belarusian civil defense authorities. But the operator told him he had been forbidden from making long-distance calls. Eventually he managed to get a connection to Kiev on his direct line, which in their haste Brukhanov and his assistants had failed to have cut off. But when Vorobyev delivered his report, the civil defense duty officer who answered refused to believe that he was serious.

  * * *

  When reactor shop supervisor Valery Perevozchenko found his way back to Control Room Number Four, he reported to Deputy Chief Engineer Dyatlov what he had seen on his abortive mission to help lower the control rods by hand: the reactor had been destroyed. Dyatlov assured him that this was impossible. Although he recognized that there had been an explosion somewhere in Unit Four, it didn’t occur to him that it might have been in the reactor core itself. Nothing in his decades of experience in the nuclear field—his years overseeing the commissioning of all those submarines in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, the start-ups of Units Three and Four in Chernobyl, the courses and manuals he had studied to keep himself abreast of the latest regulations governing the RBMK-1000—had ever suggested a reactor could explode. As Dyatlov set off down the corridor to examine the unit for himself, he was looking for evidence of gas detonating somewhere in the emergency core cooling system.

  Outside in the corridor, he ran into Oleg Genrikh and Anatoly Kurguz, who was covered in terrible burns. The skin hung from his face and hands in scarlet shreds. Dyatlov told them to go immediately to the plant sick bay and then continued down the hall to a window, where he was startled to see that the wall of the unit—all the way from mark +12 to mark +70, or more than seventeen stories in total—had collapsed completely. Heading to the end of the corridor and down the stairs, he walked slowly around the outside of Units Three and Four, taking in the gathered fire trucks, the flames licking the roofs of the buildings, and the debris littering the ground around him.

  Running back upstairs to the control room, Dyatlov saw that Leonid Toptunov, although dismissed from his post, had now returned. Dyatlov angrily demanded an explanation for this disobedience and learned that the young operator had left, but then—tugged by his sense of responsibility to the station and his comrades—turned around and came back to help. Dyatlov once again ordered him to leave. But when the deputy chief engineer left the room again a few minutes later, Toptunov stubbornly stayed put. And when a new Unit Four shift foreman arrived to take the place of Alexander Akimov, he, too, remained at his post. The two men were determined to fulfill their orders, to ensure that cooling water reached the reactor by finding the giant gate valves in the feed water complex and opening them—by hand, if necessary.

  By now, the levels of radiation in the control room had become dangerously high. Dyatlov’s strength, sapped by his repeated sorties through the radioactive debris in and around Unit Four and frequent spasms of vomiting, was fading. Shortly before dawn, he recovered the operating log and gathered the data printouts of the Skala computer—which had been monitoring the reactor in the final moments of its existence—and left Control Room Number Four for the last time.

  It was 5:15 a.m. when, weak and retching, radioactive water squelching in his shoes, Dyatlov finally staggered down the steps into the bunker to report to Director Brukhanov. He laid three recordings from the Skala on the desk: two showing the reactor’s power levels, and another showing the pressure in the primary cooling circuit. But when Brukhanov and Serhiy Parashyn, the plant’s Communist Party secretary, asked him to explain what had happened inside Unit Four, Dyatlov just threw up his hands in bewilderment.

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand any of it,” he said.

  * * *

  By five thirty in the morning, the plant was filling with technicians and specialists roused from their beds in Pripyat to help contain the growing catastrophe. Ignoring instructions from above, the shift foreman of Unit Three had ordered the emergency shutdown of his reactor and isolated its control room from the station’s ventilation system. At the other end of the plant, Units One and Two remained online, and the operators stood at their posts. But all the alarms were blaring in unison, and the armored doors in the corridors were battened down.

  In the hallway outside Control Room Number Four, the aluminum ceiling panels lay scattered on the floor, and contaminated water—much of which had passed through the wreckage of the reactor overhead and was saturated with nuclear fuel—was pouring through from above.

  And still Brukhanov’s desperate command was relayed from the bunker: “Get that water in!”

  Inside the narrow pipeline compartment on mark +27, Alexander Akimov and Leonid Toptunov labored away in darkness at the gate valves controlling the supply of water to the separator drums. The valves were usually opened remotely by electric drives, but the cables had been severed, the power long dead. The two men used all of their ebbing strength to turn the giant wheel—as broad as a man’s torso—by hand, one agonizing centimeter at a time. By 7:30 a.m., soaked to the skin and up to their ankles in the radioactive water showering from the ceiling, the two men had managed to open the valves on one coolant pipeline. But both had now been in the extraordinary gamma fields inside Unit Four for more than six hours and were suffering the initial symptoms of acute radiation syndrome. Their white overalls were gray, filthy, and wet, saturated with energetic beta-emitting radionuclides that exposed their skin to hundreds of roentgen an hour. Toptunov vomited constantly; Akimov barely had enough strength to move. No matter how hard they struggled, the final valve wouldn’t open. Eventually Akimov was helped from the compartment by his comrades, and the two men stumbled down the stairs toward the Unit Four control room, their path lit by a miner’s lamp.

  Yet as Toptunov and Akimov entered the plant infirmary, the water they had worked so hard to release gushed uselessly from shattered pipes around the smashed reactor. It spilled through Unit Four from one level to the next, running down corridors and staircases, slowly emptying the shared reserves needed to cool Unit Three, flooding the basement and the cable tunnels that linked them both, and threatening further destruction. Many more hours would pass, and other men would sacrifice themselves to the delusion that Reactor Number Four survived intact, before Director Brukhanov and the men in the bunker acknowledged their terrible mistake.

  * * *

  By 6:35 a.m. on Saturday, thirty-seven fire crews—186 firemen and 81 engines—had been summoned to Chernobyl from all over the Kiev region. Together they had managed to extinguish all the visible fires around the buildings of Reactor Number Four.
The deputy fire chief for the Kiev district declared the emergency over. And yet, from inside the remains of the reactor building, wisps of black smoke and something that looked like steam continued to twist upward, drifting away slowly into the bright spring sky.

  Picking his way through fallen debris to the end of the deaerator corridor, Senior Unit Engineer Boris Stolyarchuk leaned out through one of the shattered windows of the reserve control room and craned his neck to look down. Dawn had broken. The light was crisp and clear. What Stolyarchuk saw did not frighten him, but he was struck by one thought:

  I’m so young, and it’s all over.

  Reactor Number Four was gone. In its place was a simmering volcano of uranium fuel and graphite—a radioactive blaze that would prove all but impossible to extinguish.

  7

  * * *

  Saturday, 1:30 a.m., Kiev

  For all the comforts of his state dacha in the southern Kiev suburb of Koncha-Zaspa, where the homes of the Party and ministerial elite lay secluded among fragrant pines, Vitali Sklyarov couldn’t sleep. The Ukrainian republic’s minister of energy and electrification floundered in bed as midnight came and went, and Friday night turned into Saturday morning. At one thirty, he was staring at the ceiling in frustration when the phone rang.