Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl

by Piers Paul Read

  Together, the two men set off in search of Shashenok. Once again they had difficulty making their way up the metal staircases and along the concrete passages, at times wading through water that they now realized must be highly radioactive. They reached Shashenok’s room. The ceiling had fallen in and scalding water was still pouring out of the pipes, but Shashenok was not there. Then they saw him, lying on his stomach in the passage thirty feet away.

  He was barely alive, with atrocious burns over most of his body and several broken bones. Piotr and Shevchuk picked him up, causing him terrible pain, and carried him as best they could along the passage and down the stairs from level 27 to level 9. Shashenok tried not to complain, but he was suffering grievously and asked his saviours to avoid touching certain parts of his body. At times the passage was too narrow for two men to carry him, so the powerfully built Piotr lifted the broken body onto his shoulders.

  On level 9 they found a stretcher and used it to carry Shashenok along the passage to the medical station in the first unit. There a doctor gave him a pain-killing injection and sent him by ambulance to Pripyat.

  7

  On his way to open the valves on level 27 together with Victor and Alexander, the two young engineers, Sasha Yuvchenko remonstrated with his boss, Valeri Perevozchenko. ‘What is the point, Valeri Ivanovich?’ he asked. ‘I’ve seen the reactor from the outside. You’ve looked down into the central hall. It doesn’t exist any more. The right side has been completely destroyed. All the pipes are ruptured; I saw them swinging in the open air. They don’t go to the bubbler pool any more.’

  ‘An order is an order,’ said Valeri again. ‘Something has to be done.’

  When they reached the cramped confines on level 27 in which the valves were located, Valeri made the younger men stand aside while he climbed into a dark passage to reach the farthest valves. Alexander followed him. Sasha and Victor started on those closer at hand, but when they turned them a jet of scalding steam blew into their faces; they staggered back and waited for the steam to stop, but it continued to come out of the valve, so they left the room and shut the door.

  Valeri reappeared from the passage with Alexander and said, ‘We’ve opened the valves, the job is done.’ As they headed back towards the control room they ran into a dosimetrist in a gauze mask rushing along the passage. Sasha grabbed him to ask him the level of radiation. The man pointed to his meter and said, ‘It’s off the dial,’ then ran on. With a dread feeling in his heart, Sasha at last realized that they were all almost certainly doomed to die. His only hope was that he would do his duty courageously in these last few hours of his life.

  Now his boss, Valeri, said, ‘There can be too much of a good thing, Sasha. We’ve done all we can. Where are the rest of our people?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know where any of them are.’

  They came to a pool of light in the passage and Valeri stopped, pulling a damp packet of cigarettes out of his pocket. ‘Let’s rest for a minute,’ he said, ‘and have a smoke. Then we’ll go and look for the men.’

  The two men stood silently side by side, smoking their cigarettes. The air was wet with the steam; there were blue flashes from the short circuits. Sasha looked out of the window and thought sadly of his wife, Natasha, and son, Kirill, sleeping in their beds in Pripyat.

  IV

  1

  At the No. 2 fire station attached to the Chernobyl nuclear power station, a detachment under Lieutenant Pravik was working a twenty-four-hour shift that was due to end at 8.00 a.m. Leonid Shavrey, a hefty Belorussian from a village fifteen kilometres from Pripyat, was resting on a bunk, waiting to take over as head of the fire-fighting team at 3.00 a.m. His brothers Ivan and Piotr were in the same detachment; they were all delighted to have landed jobs in Chernobyl, thereby escaping the bucolic serfdom of life on a state farm.

  At 1.23 a.m. Leonid was awakened by the explosion, which shook the glass in the windows of the fire station. He leaped off the bunk and ran out onto the road. He saw that the roof of the fourth unit was on fire, and that a strange cloud was rising from the reactor. As the alarm started ringing he ran back into the building and jumped up next to Pravik on their new Zil 134 fire engine. As they drove towards the fourth unit, Pravik gave orders through his walkie-talkie to the duty officer at the fire station to alert the whole regional command.

  When they reached the fourth unit, Pravik ordered his men to start pumping water from the reservoirs and hydrants onto the building while he and Leonid went to investigate the fire. They tried to go through the passage connecting the third and fourth units to the control room of the fourth unit but were stopped by the fallen panels and broken glass. Then they tried to call the head of the shift on a telephone, but the line was dead. Coming out of the power station, they ran into a distracted operator, who advised them that it would be safer to fight the fire from the other side of the reactor. There they found the second fire engine from Pripyat. While some of the men unravelled the hoses, others went up to fight the fire on the roof of the turbine hall.

  At 1.56 a.m. the commander of the Chernobyl fire brigade, Major Teliatnikov, arrived from a house outside the town, where he had been on leave. His initial efforts were to prevent the fire on the roof of the turbine hall from spreading to the third unit. With no special clothing to protect them from radiation, the firemen climbed up the exterior staircases and turned their hoses on the patches of burning bitumen that had been ignited by a shower of hot black rock. The temperature was so high that the roof melted beneath their feet, and as soon as one fire was put out, another would start. After only half an hour or so, the first teams on the roof, led by Pravik and fireman Kibenok, began to feel giddy. Standing on the external staircase seventy-two metres above the ground, Ivan Shavrey felt his feet grow weak and a sweet taste come into his mouth, as if he had eaten some chocolate. He staggered down the stairs. His brother Leonid, too, began to feel weak and sick.

  From 4.00 a.m. they were joined by fire-fighting teams from the towns of Chernobyl, Polesskoe and Kiev itself. Finally Leonid Shavrey’s unit was relieved and he was told to report to the bunker below the administrative block. As he came in, he recognized Brukhanov, from whom he had once sought a permit to buy a motorbike. Then he heard that his brother Ivan, together with Major Teliatnikov and Lieutenant Pravik, were already in the hospital. When Leonid was checked by a dosimetrist the needle went off the dial. He took a shower and went to lie down in a dormitory with one hundred beds. He had a headache and felt sick but found it impossible to sleep. One of his companions fainted and was taken to the hospital. Leonid asked the doctor what would happen to him and was told that he would be given injections and put on a drip. Terrified at the thought of such torments, Leonid told the doctor that he felt fine.

  2

  As soon as Rogozhkin was told of the explosion, an alarm call had gone out from his office in unit 3 to a chosen group of people. It was a single uninterrupted ring on the telephone that, when answered, gave a recorded message that they were to report to the power station, where a grave accident had occurred. Brukhanov did not hear it because he was not in his flat in Pripyat. He had had a hard day in Kiev, arguing with underlings of the first secretary of the regional Party Committee about the hay barns he was supposed to have built and about a proposed administrative reorganization that would have removed the town of Pripyat from his control. Only a month before, he had returned in glory as a delegate to the Twenty-seventh Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union with the promise of a decoration as a ‘Hero of Socialist Labour’ when units 5 and 6 were completed; now he was back with the nightmare of serving two masters, the minister of energy in Moscow and the party in Kiev.

  Why had he not built the barns? Because he had only managed to get hold of the frames; he was not, after all, a builder but the director of a power station. The argument had gone back and forth all day. When he finally escaped from the offices of the regional committee, he had picked up his daughter and son-in-law in hi
s white Volga and driven with them back to Pripyat. There they had collected his wife, Valentina, and driven on to their dacha for the weekend. Before going to bed, Brukhanov had telephoned the power station to check that the shutdown of the fourth unit was going as planned. He was told that there were no problems and had gone thankfully to bed.

  Shortly before 2.00 a.m. he was awakened by a call from Yuri Semyonov, the head of the chemical workshop. ‘Has no one rung you, Victor Petrovich?’

  ‘No. Why should they?’

  ‘Some sort of accident, something really bad, has happened to the fourth unit.’

  Brukhanov hung up and tried unsuccessfully to reach Rogozhkin at the power station. Then he dressed, drove back to Pripyat, left his car by his flat and boarded the shuttle bus to the station. As it made for the administrative block, it passed the fourth unit and Brukhanov could see at once that the roof had been blown off the central hall. When he reached his office, he told the telephone operator to summon the entire senior management to the power station. Then he went to the control room of the fourth unit, where he found both Akimov and Dyatlov. He asked them what had happened, but neither could give him a satisfactory answer. Both seemed at a loss but assured him that the reactor was intact.

  Brukhanov returned to his office and asked the chief dosimetrist to report on the level of radiation. He was told that their gauges only measured up to 1,000 microrems per second, or 3.6 rems an hour, and in most areas the needles went off the dial. Now Brukhanov telephoned his superiors in Moscow and Kiev. According to the standing orders, he was duty bound to report any accident to a series of high officials, including Gennadi Veretennikov, the head of the All-Union Industrial Department for Nuclear Energy; Grigori Revenko, the first party secretary of the Kiev region; and the Ukrainian minister of power and electrification, Vitali Sklerov. Lastly he telephoned the chairman of the Pripyat Party Committee, Vladimir Voloshko, whom he advised to prepare for an evacuation of Pripyat.

  ‘You must be joking,’ Voloshko replied.

  ‘I assure you I am not joking,’ said Brukhanov.

  ‘But an evacuation will cause panic …’

  Brukhanov hesitated. In theory he had the authority to order the evacuation of Pripyat; in practice, he had never done anything without the approval of the party. He was not a physicist, but he had seen the damage to the fourth unit and heard the first reports of vomiting and faintness among the firemen and the personnel. Yet he had only been officially notified by the chief dosimetrist of the acceptable levels of radiation shown on the dials of the dosimeters, and the decision to evacuate the fifty thousand inhabitants of Pripyat had grave implications. It might cause panic, as Voloshko predicted; it would also break the standing orders that all nuclear accidents were state secrets. It would advertise the accident to the whole world. Who was he, a mere turbine engineer, to make a decision of such a momentous kind?

  It was in this frame of mind that he went down to the bunker to meet the assembled leaders of the civil defence.

  Prepared for war, the director of every enterprise from a ministry to a primary school had clearly defined responsibilities in an emergency of this kind. This time the system had got off to a bad start. When the duty officer of the civil defence in Kiev had been awakened by telephone and told of the accident, he had asked for the code word, and the operator did not know it. Therefore he had assumed it was a joke and had gone back to sleep. However, the local network had functioned well, and when Brukhanov came down to the bunker he found the heads of workshops, fire brigades, institutes and schools already assembled. There he announced that an explosion had taken place. No one as yet knew what had blown up; possibly it was one of the nitrogen tanks of the emergency core-cooling system. Happily, he said, the reactor remained intact, and every effort was now being made to pump water into it. The level of radiation reported by the chief dosimetrist was at most 3.6 rems an hour.

  The head of the station’s civil defence, S. S. Vorobyov, objected. He had got hold of a dosimeter capable of measuring up to 250 rems per hour and now reported to Brukhanov that in several places, such as the turbine hall, it registered over 200 rems per hour. Surely, with both firemen and operators showing symptoms of acute radiation sickness, the levels of radiation must be much higher than 3.6. Measures should be taken to protect personnel; the other units should be closed down; perhaps Pripyat should be evacuated.

  Brukhanov suggested that Vorobyov’s instrument might be faulty. He was assured that the reactor was intact, and things were bad enough without creating panic through exaggeration. Stick to the facts as reported by the chief dosimetrist. Above all, no panic.

  3

  In the control room of the fourth unit, Dyatlov saw that Akimov was ailing and ordered him to send for a replacement. Shortly before five, Akimov telephoned Vladimir Babichev. Babichev called for a car but found a bus waiting at the bus stop. The driver refused to go to the station; he said that there were roadblocks and that the guards would not let him through. Then the bald head of Nikolai Fomin appeared at the door of the bus; faced with a direct command from the chief engineer, the driver set off for the station.

  They were stopped at a roadblock a kilometre before they got there. The guards gave them iodine tablets and were about to send them back, but when they saw Fomin’s pass they let them through. Although it was still dark, Babichev could see some of the damage that had been done to the fourth unit. It seemed obvious that something must have happened to the reactor, but Akimov had always told him that it was entirely safe. He went to the changing rooms, passed through the showers, and changed into his white overalls. However, guards would not let him go to the fourth unit but directed him towards the bunker. There he found a crowd of agitated operators and engineers, among them Dyatlov, who seemed dejected and, while smoking incessantly, never met his eyes.

  ‘Ah, Volodya,’ he said. ‘Please go and replace Akimov.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Dyatlov did not answer the question. ‘Just see if you can get the pumps working.’

  Seeing a guard in front of the entrance to the fourth unit, and fearing that once again he might not be allowed in, Babichev went to the control room of the third unit and asked the head of the shift, Bagdasarov, what had happened. Again he got an evasive reply; Babichev could not make out whether Bagdasarov was afraid of making a fool of himself, scared of facing the truth, or simply did not know. Babichev went back towards the fourth unit and ran into the deputy head dosimetrist, Krasnozhon. Again he asked what had happened. ‘For God’s sake, put on protective boots and a mask,’ Krasnozhon said to him. ‘There’s more than a rem a second.’

  ‘Was anyone injured?’

  ‘Yes, Sashenok. And we can’t find Khodemchuk.’

  Finally Babichev reached Akimov in the control room of the fourth unit. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  Akimov shrugged. ‘During the test there was an explosion. We don’t know what went wrong.’

  ‘I seem to remember you saying that the chances of an accident were one in ten million.’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Akimov, ‘and this seems to be it.’

  4

  Although Babichev had now replaced him, Akimov did not leave the fourth unit but went with Leonid Toptunov to open the valves that would send water to the reactor. Babichev remained in the control room, asking the operators to report to him, but there was now no clearly established chain of command. In the bunker, Fomin was nominally in charge, but he became increasingly erratic under the strain. At times he was the heroic leader, urging his men to greater efforts; then suddenly his feverish energy would desert him and he would sink into a fit of silent gloom.

  To assist Dyatlov there now arrived some of his old friends from Komsomolsk. Vladimir Chugunov, the head of the reactor workshop of the first and second units, was reading in bed when he heard the recorded voice report a serious accident. He telephoned his office and was told that it was the fourth unit, and that a team from their workshop under Alexander Nekh
aev had already left to help.

  Anatoli Sitnikov just missed the car that had been sent to fetch Chugunov and had to walk the two kilometres through the forest to the power station. At the station, as the head of a workshop, he was asked to identify the pipes and valves that could be used to pump water to the reactor. He directed the group of young engineers from Chugunov’s workshop – Nekhaev, Orlov and Uskov – to the different valves, but the success they had in releasing the water created problems of a different kind. First, the water did not seem to be getting into the reactor, but simply flooded back into the passages and conduits at the base of the station; second, diverting the reserves of chemically clean water to the fourth reactor was leaving the third unit perilously short.

  The head of the shift in the third unit, Bagdasarov, asked Fomin if he could close it down, but was turned down. Fomin’s implacable bosses in the Ministry of Energy and Electrification had already demanded a schedule for the repair and recommissioning of the fourth unit, so it was unthinkable to tell his superiors that a further one thousand megawatts would now be removed from the grid.

  Bagdasarov ignored the chief engineer, and on his own initiative began the process of shutting down his unit, using water from the suppression pool to cool the reactor. By dawn it had closed down.

  At 7.00 a.m. on 26 April the scientific deputy chief engineer, Mikhail Lyutov, arrived at the station, and at 8.00 a.m., when the new shift arrived on schedule, Victor Smagin came to replace Akimov as the head of the shift of the fourth unit, not knowing that Babichev had arrived earlier. He too had difficulty in getting through the cordon of guards but was reassured by the dosimetrist, Krasnozhon, that the radiation level of 3.6 rems per hour meant that he could work safely for five hours. With the smell of ozone in his nostrils, he went to the control room of the fourth unit, where he found Babichev and Lyutov. Babichev told him that Akimov was off with Nekhaev, Uskov and Orlov working on supplying water to the reactor. Lyutov said that if only he knew the temperature of the graphite in the reactor he would be able to work out what was going on. Smagin told him that from what he had seen on the ground as he arrived, most of the graphite was no longer in the reactor.