Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  The arguments continued through the night. Meanwhile, the team from the Ministry of Energy’s nuclear research institute, VNIIAES, returned from their reconnaissance at the plant, where they had witnessed the terrible light show blossoming from the ruins of Unit Four. They reported to Scherbina that the radiation situation was perilous.

  At 2:00 a.m., Scherbina telephoned his Party boss in Moscow, Vladimir Dolgikh—the Central Committee secretary responsible for heavy industry and energy—and requested permission to abandon the city. By the time the scientists finally crawled into their beds in the hotel, a few hours before daybreak, Scherbina had also reached a decision about the burning reactor: to smother it by bombarding it from the air, using Antoshkin’s helicopters.

  But the members of the government commission had still reached no conclusions about what combination of materials would work, or how, exactly, such an operation might be accomplished.

  * * *

  At around 7:00 a.m. on Sunday, Boris Scherbina walked into the White House office now occupied by the Soviet Union’s leading military authorities on radiation: General Boris Ivanov, deputy chief of Soviet civil defense forces, and Colonel General Vladimir Pikalov, leader of the Chemical Warfare Troops of the USSR. He announced himself ready to address the issue of evacuation.

  “I’ve made my decision,” Scherbina said. “What’s your opinion?”

  Ivanov gave him the radiation report. Far from falling, as the Ministry of Health officials had hoped, the level of contamination on the streets of Pripyat was increasing. There was no question in the minds of the civil defense chief and his regional deputy: the population of the city was in danger not only from the radionuclides continuing to drift from the reactor but also from the fallout already accumulated on the ground.

  They must be evacuated. The officers’ view was backed up by a separate report from the director of Hospital Number 126. Only Pikalov, the imposing, beetle-browed commander of the chemical troops, a decorated veteran of the Great Patriotic War, suggested that there was still no hurry to get the people of Pripyat to safety.

  Scherbina told them that he had made up his mind: the evacuation should begin that afternoon. But he still held back from giving the order. First, he wanted to see Reactor Number Four for himself.

  Soon after 8:00 a.m., still wearing the same business suits in which they had embarked from Moscow the day before, Scherbina and Valery Legasov climbed aboard a Mi-8 helicopter parked in the middle of the city’s soccer pitch. They were joined by Generals Pikalov and Antoshkin and two men from the Kiev prosecutor’s office carrying a brand-new video camera with which to record the scene. It was less than a two-minute flight from Pripyat to the power station, and as the aircraft banked around the western end of the long turbine hall, the six men gazed through the circular portholes of the cabin at the dreadful spectacle below.

  To even the most recalcitrant Soviet eye, it was clear that Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant would never again generate a single watt of electricity. In the crisp light of the new day, it was obvious that the reactor had been completely destroyed. The roof and upper walls of the reactor hall had gone, and inside Legasov recognized the upper lid of the reactor, thrown aside by what must have been an enormous explosion and resting at a steep angle on top of the vault. He could see graphite blocks and large pieces of the fuel assemblies scattered across the roof of the machine hall and on the ground beyond. A white pillar of vapor—most likely the product of the graphite fire, Legasov thought—floated from the crater, reaching several hundred meters into the sky. And, ominously, deep within the dark ruins of the building, the scientist could see spots of deep crimson incandescence where something—he didn’t know what—appeared to be burning fiercely.

  As the helicopter headed back to Pripyat, Legasov knew conclusively that he was dealing with not merely yet another regrettable failure of Soviet engineering but also a disaster on a global scale, one that would affect the world for generations to come. And now it was up to him to contain it.

  * * *

  At ten o’clock on Sunday morning, a full thirty-two hours after the catastrophe had begun, Boris Scherbina gathered the Soviet and local Party staff in the gorkom offices of the White House. At last, he gave the order to evacuate Pripyat.

  At 1:10 p.m., the radio-tochki in kitchens across the city finally broke their silence. In a strident, confident voice, a young woman read aloud the announcement drafted that morning by a gaggle of senior officials and approved by Scherbina:

  Attention! Attention! Dear comrades! The City Council of People’s Deputies would like to inform you that, due to an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the city of Pripyat, adverse radiation conditions are developing. Necessary measures are being taken by the Party and Soviet organizations and the armed forces. However, in order to ensure complete safety for the people—and, most importantly, the children—conducting a temporary evacuation of city residents to nearby localities in the Kiev region has become necessary. . . . We ask that you remain calm, be organized, and maintain order during this temporary evacuation.

  The emergency proclamation was worded carefully: it didn’t tell the citizens how long they would endure their enforced absence, but deliberately led them to believe it would be a short time. They were told to pack only their important documents and enough clothing and food for two or three days. They should close their windows and turn off their gas and electricity. Municipal workers would remain behind to maintain city utilities and infrastructure. The empty homes would be guarded by police patrols. Some, fearing what would happen in their absence, packed only their most valuable possessions—party dresses, jewelry, flatware. Others packed winter clothes and prepared for the worst.

  * * *

  Earlier that morning, Natalia Yuvchenko—carrying a towel, a toothbrush, and the other things her injured husband had asked her to bring to him—had returned expectantly to the grounds of Medical-Sanitary Center Number 126. But when she reached the spot beneath the window where she and Alexander had talked the day before, she found no sign of him or any of the other men and women from the plant. The windows of the building stood open, but the entire wing of the hospital—which just a few hours earlier had been filled with patients—was now completely deserted. She looked around for someone to ask about where they might have gone but found no one.

  When Yuvchenko got back to her apartment on Stroiteley Prospekt, her neighbors told her about the announcement of a citywide evacuation: they would be gone for three days; buses would be coming to collect everyone; until then, keep all children inside; wait. There was no time for fear or panic. There were too many questions to be answered: Where are my friends? Where will we be going? When will we return?

  Yuvchenko focused on immediate necessities: First, she had to make sure she had all of the family documents. She gathered their internal passports, their university diplomas, vaccination certificates, and the papers for the apartment. Then: Where would she find the milk she needed to feed Kirill for three days? All of the shops were closed. Above all, she needed to find her husband.

  But it wasn’t long before she discovered why Alexander had vanished so suddenly. Soon afterward, Sasha Korol—working through the list of addresses he had scribbled down on the bus the previous evening—arrived at her door and explained what he had witnessed of the medical airlift to Moscow. Unbidden, he also brought Natalia money—100 rubles, almost a month’s salary—and a carton of milk for the baby.

  Setting down the milk on the seat of Alexander’s bicycle in the hallway, she went into the bedroom to pack. She filled a small suitcase—clothes for the boy, a couple of dresses, some shoes—and went downstairs to wait.

  * * *

  On the second floor of the White House, as military officers, scientists, and members of the government commission came and went, Maria Protsenko had remained at her desk throughout Saturday night. There was much to do and few people to do it: most of the technical staff of the ispolkom had be
en sent home.

  Regardless of the crisis at the plant, Protsenko had felt determined to take care of the mountain of paperwork required for the planned development and expansion of the city. She remained confident it would proceed on schedule.

  Yet every hour the chemical troops of the civil defense kept returning and asked her to draw another set of maps, as they continued to log the rising levels of radiation in Pripyat and beyond. And at eight o’clock on Saturday evening, the mayor had told her to prepare the city for a possible evacuation. Nothing was confirmed yet. But if the order came, he said she should be ready to get the entire population of Pripyat out at short notice—by bus and by train.

  In the meeting room across the hall from her office, Protsenko joined a group of twenty members of the city administration to make the arrangements. The architect laid out the maps and counted every apartment building in the city, while the chiefs of the internal passport department and the district zheks added up the number of families in each complex, and how many children and elderly each family included. Together with the city’s head of civil defense, Protsenko then calculated the number of buses that would be needed to collect them all from each of the city’s six microdistricts.

  In all, there were some 51,300 men, women, and children in Pripyat, of whom more than 4,000 were station operators and construction workers expected to remain behind to take care of essential services in the city and work at the power plant itself. To get all the families out safely would require more than a thousand buses—plus two river vessels and three diesel trains, which would be directed to Yanov railway station and used to ship out the single men who filled the city’s dormitory complexes.

  At the same time, in Kiev, the Ukrainian Ministry of Transport began requisitioning buses from motor transport enterprises all over the city and the surrounding towns and suburbs, summoning their drivers to work late on Saturday night and preparing them to travel toward Pripyat under police escort. At 11:25 p.m. they received the Ukrainian Council of Ministers’ order to move. By 3:50 a.m., five hundred vehicles had already arrived at the city limits, with five hundred more reaching Chernobyl town less than a half hour later. Before dawn, a column of vehicles some twelve kilometers long had halted on the road toward Pripyat, while the drivers awaited further instructions and ate from a mobile canteen. The entire operation was conducted beneath a blanket of secrecy. By midmorning on Sunday, the bus stops of Kiev were crowded with frustrated passengers waiting in vain for scheduled services that would never show up.

  * * *

  By lunchtime on Sunday, the citizens of Pripyat had begun to gather outside their buildings to await their departure from the city, clutching small shopping bags of belongings, supplies of food—boiled potatoes, bread, lard—and handfuls of documents. There was no sign of panic. Despite warnings to stay inside, parents found it hard to control young children, who ran around and played in the dusty streets. Some families set off on foot.

  At the same time, the crews of two helicopters of the Fifty-First Guards Helicopter Regiment prepared to begin an airborne assault on Reactor Number Four. The operation, approved by Boris Scherbina at eight that morning, began in a frenzy of improvisation. Not only takeoff and landing sites, but flight plans, speed, trajectory, radiation conditions—all had to be worked out by General Antoshkin and his men, and all were subject to the short-tempered demands of the chairman of the government commission. As the pilots began their reconnaissance sorties establishing flight paths over the reactor, Scherbina’s attention turned to locating the thousands of tonnes of material they intended to drop into it.

  Valery Legasov and the other scientists would eventually formulate a complex cocktail of substances to dump inside the ruins of Unit Four—including clay, lead, and dolomite—which they hoped would quench the graphite fire, cool the incandescent nuclear fuel, and block the release of further radionuclides into the atmosphere. Old man Aleksandrov and the nuclear physicists from the Kurchatov Institute recommended the lead, as well as the dolomite—a naturally occurring mineral containing calcium and magnesium carbonate. With its low melting point, the scientists believed that the lead would be liquefied in the heat of the blaze, helping to cool the temperature of the nuclear fuel and trapping radionuclides released from the ruined core. They also hoped that it would flow into the bottom of the reactor vessel, where it would solidify to form a barrier against gamma radiation. They intended the dolomite to cool the fuel and also to decompose chemically in the heat of the blaze, releasing carbon dioxide, which would deprive the graphite fire of oxygen. Aleksandrov suggested adding clay, too, which might seal up the reactor and help absorb radionuclides.

  But none of these substances could be found at the power plant. Lead, in particular, was among the many raw materials in short supply throughout the USSR. And it was imperative that the operation begin at once. Scherbina instructed the pilots to begin bombing the reactor with powdered boron—the neutron moderator that would head off the possibility of further chain reactions in the remaining uranium—which had finally arrived by truck from the nuclear power plant in Rovno. Legasov had ridden out into the shadow of the reactor in an armored personnel carrier to take neutron radiation readings himself, and his data seemed to confirm that the chain reaction had now ceased amid the debris. But the physicists wanted to be certain it couldn’t start again.

  In the meantime, Scherbina sent General Antoshkin and two deputy ministers of the USSR—both nuclear specialists—down to the bank of the Pripyat, where they personally began filling sacks with sand. Academician Legasov argued that sand would stifle the fire and create a filtering layer on top of the burning reactor, to trap the escaping hot particles and radioactive gases. It was also cheap and plentiful. Maria Protsenko’s preparations to expand the city had already involved dredging the river for tonnes of it, which now lay piled on the bank beside the city’s waterfront cafe—just two blocks from the square in front of the Hotel Polesia, where the helicopters landed. This was just as well, as the quantities required were enormous: the scientists suggested that the reactor should be covered with a layer of absorbents at least a meter thick. According to their calculations, around fifty thousand bags would do it.

  It was hot on the riverbank, and the general and the two ministers—still wearing their suits and city shoes—were soon bathed in sweat. And if the sun was bad, the radiation was worse. They had neither respirators nor dosimeters. One of the ministers sought help from the manager of a group of nuclear assembly specialists, who demanded that his men be paid a bonus for working in a contaminated area. But even with their help, the scale of the task was overwhelming. Two of the specialists drove to a nearby collective farm—named Druzhba, or “Friendship”—where they found kolkhoz workers out in the fields, busy with spring sowing. The farmworkers, relaxed and happy in the sunshine, didn’t believe what they were told about the accident, the need to stifle the burning reactor—or that the soil they were tilling was already poisoned with radiation. Only after the farm director and Party secretary arrived and repeated the explanation of the crisis again and again did the workers agree to help. Eventually between 100 and 150 men and women from the kolkhoz volunteered to join the effort on the riverbank, reinforced by troops from the Kiev civil defense detachment.

  But Boris Scherbina remained implacable. Back inside the White House, he drove the ministers and generals to work harder and more quickly and reserved a furious contempt for the representatives of the nuclear ministries. They seemed to be gifted at blowing up reactors, he roared, but pathetic at filling sandbags.

  If he was aware of the rising level of contamination in the air all around them, Scherbina didn’t show it. The chairman seemed to regard the dangers of radiation with the haughty disdain of a cavalry officer striding across a battlefield bursting with cannon fire. And almost everyone else on the commission followed his lead: mentioning the radioactivity surrounding them seemed almost tactless. Among the ministers, an air of Soviet bravado prevailed.

/>   At last, early on Sunday afternoon, the first ten bags of sand—each weighing sixty kilos or more—were carried up to the square and loaded aboard one of General Antoshkin’s helicopters.

  * * *

  There were 1,225 buses in all, painted in a kaleidoscope of colors, representing more than a dozen different Soviet transport enterprises: some red, some yellow, some green, and some blue; some half red, half white; others with a stripe—plus 250 trucks and other vehicles in support, including ambulances from the civil defense, repair trucks, and fuel tankers. At 2:00 p.m., a full day and a half after the pall of radionuclides had first begun drifting into the atmosphere, the motley caravan of vehicles waiting at the Pripyat city limits at last began to move.