‘Sasha’ Yuvchenko was in his office between reactors 3 and 4
when he heard a heavy thud then an explosion.
“Seconds
later I felt a wave come through the room.
The
thick concrete walls bent like rubber,
I saw a cloud of milky grey dust and steam and the lights went out.
I
thought war had broken out.
I was ordered to find some stretchers.
We
looked for Valery Khodemchuk, the pump operator
but
he had vaporised, we never found anything of his body.
That section of the building where he worked had disappeared.
Steam
wrapped around everything;
it
was dark and I heard a horrible hissing noise.
There
was no ceiling, only sky; a sky full of stars.
A
blue glow of ionized air was shooting up from the reactor.”
Yuvchenko
and three others climbed a stairwell to Level 35
to
inspect the damaged reactor hall. He stayed outside,
keeping
the heavy hall door open with his shoulder.
The
three men hurried in, saw the destruction and ran out
closing the door behind them. Yuvchenko noticed
how grim and distorted their nuclear tanned faced looked.
"You
don't feel anything at the time,
we
had no idea there was so much radiation.
We
scrambled away and met a guy with a dosimeter
and
the needle was just way off the dial.
Even
then, we were still only thinking 'Rats,
this
means the end of our careers in the nuclear industry.
We
all thought, 'We've been exposed now,
this
has happened on our watch.'
Sasha’s
throat was sore, there was a metallic taste
in his mouth and he started to vomit uncontrollably.
By
5am, he was too weak to walk.
He was taken to hospital, was seen once by a nurse
and interviewed three times by the KGB.
The next night Sasha and his badly injured co-workers
were
flown to Moscow. He lay in his hospital bed
listening as one after the after
his three colleagues died and Sasha waited for his turn.
“It is a horrible way to die,
burnt
from both inside and outside.”
Doctors
measured the fall
in his white blood-cell count and told him
he'd
received 410rem, usually a lethal dose.
Sasha and those who had started to vomit early
were given bone-marrow transplants
and continuous blood and plasma transfusions.
He pulled back the sheets to look at his wounds
and
a cloud of black dust rose off his body - his dead skin.
Where his body had touched the door -
his left shoulder, hip and calf –
the
radiation had eaten away at his flesh,
deep into the tissue of his swollen arm.
“Like all the others, I should have died.
The doctors told me if you've survived this,
you
shouldn't worry about anything else
for
the rest of your life."
They didn’t say how long or painful that life would be.
