I remember watching the news, cringing hearing that a nuclear plant exploded in Russia, thinking, Oh no, oh Lord, no, the poor kids there! My next thought was that we could get some of the radiation in our rain all the way here from an explosion like that, couldn't we?
When Chernobyl blew up in 1986, Sarah was 6 years old, Bonnie was 3. I held them tight thinking wow, if we had a disaster like that here, wouldn't the children just be vaporized? And I watched the news. And I clipped the articles from the papers, saved them in an album. I think Sarah still has that album.
The news tho, wasn't too bad. Reports as I remember, said that it was contained, not as dangerous as they'd thought.. people were safe, there was some fall out, some people died in the accident, but it wasn't as bad as had been predicted in a situation like that. People had been evactuated, everything was going to be fine.
I don't know how long it took, but I know it was days and days before they finally said the fire was out.
I just found out a couple of days ago when I went looking for sites of Chernobyl photos, that most of the helicoptor drivers died, they had guys called 'liquidators' who were to forced to go in and evacuate, rescue and clean up..who had either died soon after or later with cancers from the radiation. I read on one site that the first firemen on the scene were fried, they went, not expecting the disaster that was waiting for them, and all of them perished.
There are graveyards with the ambulances, firetrucks, helicoptors, the equipment that had too much radiation saturating them to ever be used again. Villages empty and practically still glowing with radiation. So many dead or with cancer. Good grief.
They built a sarcophogus (sp?) around the reactor, from the photos it looks like a huge tin coffin, it really does... it's deteriorating, melting, the radiation is killing it. I wonder how long it's going to take for them to put a coffin over the coffin?
Good Grief.
Posted by juel at April 26, 2006 10:55 AM