Midnight in Chernobyl
Page 17
“Natalia,” she said, “your husband asked me to tell you that you shouldn’t go to work. He’s in the hospital. There’s been an accident at the station.”
* * *
Around the corner, at home on Heroes of Stalingrad Street, Maria Protsenko heard a commotion in the apartment downstairs. Just as she did whenever she wanted to telegraph the neighbors below with important news, or to share something on the stove that was particularly tasty, Protsenko rapped on the kitchen radiator with a spoon. The response came clanging right back: Come down!
Protsenko was a small but formidable forty-year-old who wore her dark, curly hair cropped sensibly short, born in China to Sino-Russian parents, yet forged in the crucible of the USSR. Her grandfather had been arrested and disappeared into the Gulag during Stalin’s purges; when she was a baby, both her older brothers died from diphtheria because they were kept from seeing a doctor by the curfew in the Chinese border town where they lived. After that, her grief-stricken father sank into opium addiction, and her mother fled into Soviet Kazakhstan, where she raised Maria alone. A graduate in architecture from the Institute of Roads and Transport in Ust-Kamenogorsk, Protsenko had been Pripyat’s chief architect for seven years, with her own office on the second floor of the city ispolkom. It was from there that she oversaw the execution of Pripyat’s new construction projects, with a profoundly un-Soviet eye for detail. Barred from Party membership by her Chinese birth, she brought an outsider’s zeal to her work. She roamed the streets with a ruler, checking on the quality of the concrete paneling in new apartment buildings. She chastised the construction workers for shoddy sidewalks: “Children will break their legs, and then how will you feel?” When persuasion wouldn’t work, she lashed them with invective. More than a few of the men were afraid of her.
Many of Pripyat’s apartments and major buildings—the Palace of Culture, the hotel, the ispolkom itself—were erected from standardized blueprints produced in Moscow and designed to be reproduced identically in every town in every corner of the USSR. But Protsenko did what she could to make them unique. In spite of the prevailing state doctrine calling for gloomy “proletarian aesthetics”—rejecting decadent Western notions of individuality in the interests of economy—she wanted them to be beautiful. Protsenko worked frugally with small supplies of hardwood, ceramic tiles, or granite to decorate the interiors of Pripyat’s public buildings, designing parquet flooring and wrought-iron screens in a botanical pattern for the restaurant, or inlaying small sections of marble in the walls of the Palace of Culture. She watched as the city grew from just two microdistricts to three, then four. She helped choose the names of the new streets as they were added, and attended to the finer points of each of the city’s new amenities. The library, the swimming pool, the shopping center, the sports stadium—all passed through her hands.
As she left her apartment that morning, Protsenko was still expecting to spend the day at the office, busy with preparations for another expansion of the city. Only the day before, she had received a delegation from the urban design institute in Kiev. Together they were planning the infrastructure of Pripyat’s sixth new district, to be constructed on reclaimed land beside the river to accommodate the workers who would operate the first reactors of Director Brukhanov’s massive new Chernobyl Two plant. Dredging was under way, bringing up sand from the river bottom to provide the foundations of the extra neighborhoods. When they were complete, Pripyat would be home to as many as two hundred thousand people.
By the time Protsenko made her way to the apartment downstairs, it was past eight o’clock on Saturday morning. Her fifteen-year-old daughter had already left for school; her husband, who worked as a mechanic for the city, was still asleep in bed. She found the neighbors—her close friend Svetlana and her husband, Viktor—sitting at their kitchen table. Despite the early hour, they were drinking shots of moonshine vodka, or samogon. Svetlana explained that her brother had called from the plant. There had been an explosion.
“We’re going to chase away the shitiki!” Viktor said, raising a glass. Like many construction and energy workers at the plant, he believed that radiation created contaminated particles in the blood—shitiki—against which vodka was a useful prophylactic. Just as Protsenko was telling him that she didn’t think she could handle samogon, whatever the need, her own husband appeared in the doorway: “You’ve got a phone call.”
It was the secretary from the ispolkom. “I’m coming over,” Protsenko said.
* * *
By 9:00 a.m., hundreds of members of the militsia had been mobilized on the streets of Pripyat, and all roads into the town had been cut off by police roadblocks. But as the city’s leaders—including Protsenko, Deputy Mayor Esaulov, the Pripyat civil defense chief, and the directors of schools and enterprises—gathered for an emergency meeting at the White House, elsewhere in Pripyat the day began exactly as it would on any warm Saturday morning.
Across the city’s five schools and in the Goldfish and Little Sunshine kindergartens, thousands of children started their lessons. Beneath the trees outside, mothers walked babies in their strollers. People took to the beach to sunbathe, fish, and swim in the river. In the grocery stores, shoppers stocked up on fresh produce, sausage, beer, and vodka for the May Day holiday. Others headed off to their dachas and vegetable gardens on the outskirts of the city. Outside the cafe beside the river jetty, last-minute preparations were under way for an alfresco party to celebrate a wedding, and at the stadium, the city soccer team was warming up for an afternoon match.
Inside the fourth-floor conference hall of the White House, Vladimir Malomuzh, the Party’s second secretary for the Kiev region, took the stage. Malomuzh had arrived from Kiev just an hour or two earlier and, since the Party took precedence over government in emergency situations, was now in charge. Beside him stood the two most powerful men in the city: plant director Viktor Brukhanov and construction boss Vasily Kizima.
“There has been an accident,” Malomuzh said, but offered no further information. “The conditions are being evaluated right now. When we know more details, we’ll let you know.”
In the meantime, he explained, everything in Pripyat should carry on as usual. Children should stay at school; stores should remain open; the weddings planned that day should continue.
Naturally, there were questions. Members of the Young Pioneers of School Number Three—1,500 children in all, part of the Communist equivalent of the Scouts—were due to assemble in the Palace of Culture that day. Could they proceed with the meeting? There was a children’s health run scheduled for the following day through the streets of the city. Should that go ahead, too? Malomuzh assured the school director that there was no need for a change of plans; everything should continue as normal.
“And please do not panic,” he said. “Under no circumstances should you panic.”
* * *
At 10:15 a.m., a solitary armored car—the lead radiation reconnaissance scout vehicle of the 427th Red Banner Mechanized Regiment of the Civil Defense Forces of the USSR—swung slowly left off the Kiev road toward Pripyat. Hatches sealed and dosimetry instruments on, its engine whined as it rose over the bridge across the railway line. The city came into view through the crew’s thick bulletproof windows. Everything seemed normal.
Trailing behind at a distance of eight hundred meters, as combat protocol required, the remaining vehicles of the reconnaissance column caught up with the scout car on the square outside the White House. The civil defense troops had been instructed to conduct a radiation survey of the city and its surroundings but lacked any detailed maps of the plant, or Pripyat. Up on the second floor of the White House, a detachment of men found Maria Protsenko, who had maps of the city but no means to copy them. As photocopiers could be used to create samizdat materials, access to the few in the USSR was controlled tightly by the KGB. Protsenko sat down at her drawing board and began turning out schematics of the city as quickly as she could by hand.
At noon, as the radiation
reconnaissance troops divided into groups and set off to take dosimetric readings across the city, an Mi-8 helicopter of the Soviet Armed Forces 225th Composite Air Squadron headed toward Pripyat from the south. In the pilot’s seat was Captain Sergei Volodin, who, along with his two-man crew, had been on standby that morning at the military airport in Borispol. The duty was part of a regular rotation, which required one helicopter crew to be ready for emergencies anywhere in the Kiev military district. Volodin and his men were otherwise accustomed to the more comfortable task of ferrying Soviet dignitaries around the republic—their helicopter was specially modified for the purpose, its carpeted cabin furnished with comfortable armchairs, a toilet, and even a bar. Although they had received mandatory training to prepare them to fly combat missions in the mountains of Afghanistan, the call-up had never come.
At around nine that morning, Volodin had received orders to conduct an airborne radiation survey around the Chernobyl plant. On the way there, he was to collect a senior officer of the civil defense who could supply the necessary details. After filing his flight plan, Volodin went to the duty officer to collect personal dosimeters for himself and his crew. But the instruments’ batteries were corroded. Only the squadron’s chemical services officer could replace them, and he was on the other side of the airfield, building a garage for the base commander. Volodin decided he could do without personal dosimeters. And although he and his crew had been issued respirators and rubber chemical protection suits for the mission, flying in such an outfit seemed impossible. The weather was still warm, and it was hot inside the cockpit, even in their summer uniforms. At around 10:00 a.m., the flight engineer started the engines, and Volodin set off in his shirtsleeves. He collected the civil defense officer—a major equipped with his own military radiation detection equipment—and continued toward Pripyat to gather further instructions.
Volodin knew Chernobyl well. He often ferried the squadron’s helicopters to the big military aircraft plant in Kaunas, Lithuania, for annual maintenance, and the trips would take him past the gleaming white boxes of the power station. Sometimes, just out of curiosity, he’d turn on the DP-3 battlefield radiometer installed behind his seat in the cockpit. Intended for use after a nuclear attack, the DP-3 could be adjusted across four ranges of sensitivity: measuring up the scale from 10 to 100, 250, and, finally, 500 roentgen an hour. But he’d never seen the needle even flicker.
Now, as the pilot approached the station at a height of two hundred meters, he could see white smoke drifting above the buildings. He told the engineer to turn on the cockpit radiometer. His navigator prepared to make the calculations necessary to estimate from their airborne readings what the radiation dosage might be on the ground. Volodin caught sight of a yellow Ikarus bus driving between the incomplete Fifth and Sixth Units of the power station. Well, he thought, if people are still at work down there, everything must be okay.
Then he saw that the western end of the plant had collapsed. Inside, something was burning.
“Eighteen roentgen an hour,” the flight engineer reported. “Climbing rapidly.” The civil defense major opened the door of the cockpit to report that his hand was radioactive. He’d opened a cabin window to take his own readings outside: 20 roentgen an hour.
Leaving the plant behind, Volodin prepared to set down the helicopter in Pripyat so that the major could gather detailed instructions for the survey flight. He circled the city to land against the wind. He noticed how many people were out on the streets, fishing on the riverbank, planting potatoes in their allotments. The sky was a clear blue, the forest a vivid green. A flock of white gulls wheeled overhead.
Volodin brought down the Mi-8 near a playground on the southwestern edge of the city, where he hoped to avoid creating too much disturbance. But the machine always attracted attention whenever it landed near civilians. It was quickly surrounded by a crowd of adults and children. The adults wanted to know what was going on at the station and how soon they’d be able to get back to work there. The children wanted to see inside the helicopter. While the civil defense major went into the city, Volodin allowed them in, six or seven at a time, to look around.
* * *
Back at the plant, the staff summoned during the night by emergency telephone calls had been joined by members of the regular morning shift, who arrived for work as usual at eight o’clock. At the construction headquarters, just four hundred meters from Unit Four, the daily briefing began as it always did, but it was broken up by news of an accident at the plant, and everyone was sent home. Yet there was no great sense of alarm. Some construction workers took advantage of an unexpected day off, going to their dachas or swimming at the beach. There were mishaps all the time at the plant, and radiation had never seemed to hurt anyone. The last time something like this happened, trucks had appeared in Pripyat to spray the streets, and children had played barefoot in the decontaminant foam when they passed.
From her desk in the White House, Maria Protsenko phoned home to tell her husband to vacuum and wash the floors of the apartment and make sure that when their fifteen-year-old daughter returned home from school she changed her clothes and showered. Yet when she called back two hours later, she found them both unflustered by her warnings. They were watching a movie together on TV, and her daughter hadn’t even bothered to wash: “When the movie finishes, I’ll go,” she said.
Even those who had seen the developing catastrophe firsthand found it hard to reconcile the destruction at the plant with the carefree atmosphere on the streets of Pripyat. A manager working on the Fifth and Sixth Units had seen the blaze for himself as he returned late at night by road from a trip to Minsk. Just an hour after the explosion, he stopped his car less than a hundred meters from the shattered reactor hall of Unit Four and watched, transfixed and terrified, as firemen on the roof struggled to contain the flames. Yet when he awoke at home in Pripyat at ten the following morning, everything seemed so normal. He felt determined to enjoy the day with his family.
Elsewhere, however, there were signs that not everything in the city was quite as it should be. The technician’s next-door neighbor, an electrical assembly man, spurned the beach that morning in favor of the roof of his apartment building, where he lay down on a rubber mat to sunbathe. He stayed up there for a while, and noticed that he began to tan right away. Almost immediately, his skin gave off a burning smell. At one point, he came down for a break, and his neighbor found him oddly excited and good humored, as if he’d been drinking. When no one else seemed interested in joining him up on the roof, the man returned there alone and continued to work on his accelerated tan.
But at the plant, the nuclear engineers on the morning shift recognized all too clearly the danger the city was facing and tried to warn their families. Some managed to reach them by telephone and told them to stay indoors. Knowing that the KGB was monitoring the calls, one tried to use coded language to prepare his wife to escape the city. Another persuaded Director Brukhanov to let him go home for lunch and then packed his family into the car to take them to safety, only to be turned back at the end of Lenina Prospekt by an armed militsia officer manning a roadblock. The city had been sealed off. No one would be permitted to leave without official clearance.
Arriving at Yanov station at around 11:00 a.m., Veniamin Prianichnikov, the director of the plant’s technical training programs, had missed all the drama of the preceding twelve hours. He had been away on a business trip in Lvov. On his way home on the train that morning, he overheard other passengers discussing rumors of a major accident. Prianichnikov, an experienced nuclear physicist whose expertise had taken him from the plutonium factories of Krasnoyarsk-26 to the atomic testing grounds of Kazakhstan, had worked on the Chernobyl project at its inception and was proud of his position at the plant. He knew the reactors well and refused to believe the tittle-tattle: an explosion in the reactor core was impossible under any conditions he could imagine. He argued so vociferously with his fellow passengers that they almost came to blows.
From the apartment, he tried calling the station, but the line was dead. Taking to his bicycle, he found his wife a few kilometers outside of town at their dacha, tending her flowers. She refused to believe anything was amiss. Only when he showed her the dark specks of graphite on the leaves of her strawberry plants did she agree to return home.
Prianichnikov suspected the accident was a catastrophic failure of the reactor, but without a dosimeter, he found it hard to convince his neighbors of such a heretical idea. He couldn’t make them listen, and—as someone whose father and grandfather had both died at the hands of the Party—he knew that it could be dangerous to try too hard.
* * *
When the civil defense major returned to Captain Volodin’s helicopter, he brought news that the damage they’d seen at the plant had been caused by an explosion. A government commission was on its way from Moscow: when they arrived, they would need a full report on the current situation. The major said he would accompany Volodin and his men as they flew a triangular route around the city to locate areas of potentially high radioactive contamination. Before they took off again, Volodin told everyone nearby to take their children indoors and close the windows.
At around 1:30 p.m., the pilot took the helicopter up to a hundred meters, flew north, over the first of three villages close to Pripyat, and then turned to the west. The cockpit dosimeter remained at zero. Volodin dropped to fifty meters and continued toward the next village; nothing. He brought the helicopter down farther, to just twenty-five meters, but the needle of the radiometer didn’t move. Volodin suspected that it just wasn’t sensitive enough to get a reading. Passing the final turning point on the survey flight plan, Volodin began following the railway line, in the direction of the Chernobyl plant itself.