Chernobyl Museum
We found out that there was a museum dedicated to the tragedy at Chernobyl and that is was situated in Kiev, not far from our hostel.
The day after our trip to the zone, we made a visit.
We were still quite emotional from our time in the zone, and a number of times I had tears in my eyes while we were walking around or listening to the guide.
The Ukrainian people, as well as the people of Belarus and surrounding areas, suffered greatly from the accident. Worse than that was the fact that they were kept in the dark a great deal about the risks and dangers involved.
On one day, just after the accident, the Ukrainian coverage of the accident was 5 sentences on page 5 of the national newspaper. The same day the New York Times carried a full front page story about the tragedy.
The Ukrainian Health Minister claimed in 2006 that more than 2.4 million Ukrainians, including 428,000 children, suffer from health problems related to the catastrophe
The museum holds photographs of some of the people killed in the accident or in it's aftermath.
Estimations vary considerably about how many people died because of the accident at the power plant, from 25.00 to over 200,000.
There are only around 4000 photographs in the museum, of the people who gave their lives in the days and weeks after the accident, but they cover every wall and every surface. It is a sobering sight.
The people who died were mainly the "liquidators".
Liquidator is the name given in the former USSR to the approximately 800,000 people who were in charge of the removal of the consequences of the April 26 1986 Chernobyl disaster on the site of the event.
Liquidators included the following groups of people:
Personnel of the reactors
about 40 firefighters, who were among the first to deal with the catastrophe, all now deceased
a 300-person brigade of Civil Defense from Kiev who buried the contaminated soil
medical personnel
various workers and military who performed deactivation and clean-up of the area
construction workers who constructed the "sarcophagus" over the exploded reactor
Internal Troops, who ensured secure access to the complex
transport workers
coal miners, who used their expertise to pump out the contaminated water to prevent its entrance into groundwater
Nikolai Melnik, Hero of the Soviet Union, a helicopter pilot who placed radiation sensors on the reactor
The firefighters didn't realise when they were first called to the plant, that it was a reactor fire.
They had no idea of the danger they would be in, but even when they started to get sick, they did not leave their task. Even knowing that it would probably kill them, they battled on to put out the fire, to try to stop a possible second explosion that would be more devastating than the first.
The "liquidators", were sent out in teams to work very short shifts - up to 30 seconds - removing the debris from the roof of the reactor so that construction could begin on the Sarcophagus that would enclose the reactor and the damaged core.
Due to the extremely high doses of radiation that they received they could not work for more tha n matter of seconds, so vast amounts of men were used in relays - as one group came off the roof another was going on.
Many of these men were young - in their late teens and early twenties.
I find it very hard to understand why the story of the Chernobyl accident is not taught in schools.
Maybe the death toll is not a high as the world wars we have seen, but this battle was fought by civilians and soldiers alike and it's affect are still being felt, and dealt with, on a daily basis by thousands of people, men, women and children.
It should be taught so that people can learn from the mistakes of the past - please don't let this happen again.
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