Today’s Heroic Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Sergei Vasilyevich Sobolev, Deputy Head of the Executive Committee of the Shield of Chernobyl Association, discussing the sacrifices made during the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear accident:
There’s an entire section of the museum devoted to the helicopter pilots. There’s Colonel Vodalazhsky, a Hero of Russia, buried on Belarussian ground in the village of Zhukov Lug. After he received more than the allowable dose of radiation, he was supposed to leave right away, but he stayed and trained thirty-three more helicopter crews. He himself performed 120 flights, releasing 230 tons of cargo. He made an average of between four and five flights per day, flying at 300 meters above the reactor, with the temperature in his cabin up to 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit!). Imagine what was happening below as the bags of sand were being dropped from above. the activity reached 1800 roentgen per hour; pilots began to feel it while still in the air. In order to hit the target, which was a fiery crater, they stuck their heads out of their cabins and measured it with the naked eye. There was no other way. At the meetings of government commissions, every day it was very simply said: “We’ll need to put down two to three lives for this. And for this, one life.” Simply, and every day.
Colonel Vodalazhsky died. On the card indicating the amount of radiation he received above the reactor, the doctors put down 7 becs. In fact it was 600!
And the four hundred miners who worked round the clock to blast a tunnel under the reactor? They needed a tunnel into which to pour liquid nitrogen and freeze the earthen pillow, as the engineers call it. Otherwise the reactor would have gone into the groundwater. So there were miners from Moscow, Kiev, Dniepropetrovsk. I didn’t read about them anywhere. But they were down there naked, with temperatures reaching fifty degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), rolling little cars before them while crouching down on all fours. There were hundreds of roentgen. Now they’re dying. But if they hadn’t done this? I consider them heroes, not victims, of a war, which supposedly never happened. They call it an accident, a catastrophe. But it was a war. The Chernobyl monuments look like war monuments.
Culled from: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
Again, nothing but respect for these people. True heroes.
i would probably do it for my family’s direct safety but i don’t think i could find it in me to do what they did. i agree, they are heroes.
Thank you for posting parts of this book!I am getting a copy ASAP. Chernoble has fascinated me for a long time, I love the pictures and the stories. My favorite is the ferris wheel at the amusement park I affectionately refer to as Six Flags Over Pripyat.