THE LIQUIDATORS
The memorial to Chernobyl night. For the dead and the unborn....written in stone to the living.
These fire engines never returned in their garages and the firemen they carried never returned to their homes. They were the first on the scene and thought it was an ordinary fire. They did not know what they were really dealing with.
The "Liquidators" were recruited or forced to assist in the cleanup or the liquidation of the consequences of the accident.
As a totalitarian government, the Soviet Union provided many young soldiers to assist with the cleanup of the Chernobyl accident, but did not provide many of them with adequate protective clothing - or any explanation of the dangers involved. Soviet army generals did say to each soldier- You are hero who voluntarily walks into the unknown. What they didn't say is that unknown was unknown only because the communist government didn't want it to be known. It would be impossible to find over half million people if they knew what they walk into. 650,000 liquidators helped in the cleanup of the Chernobyl disaster in the first year. This group includes those who built the containment building over the destroyed reactor No. 4 which is called the SARCOPHAGUS
Picture: Liquidators on their way to Chernobyl.
Soldiers on the roof of Unit # 3 pick up deadly pieces of radioactive graphite after explosion and toss them down into the cauldron of the demolished reactor core.
First, they tried to use robots, but technics have been disabled either by high radiation or been entangled in debris, then they sent thousands of soldiers- biorobots.
Work on the roof was the shortest job of all, and lasted only two minutes. Many soldiers were offered a choice of how to fulfill the tour of duty requirement that was necessary for their retirement from Army. One lasted two years in a hellish rain of bullets, rockets and bombs in Afghanistan, and the other lasted two minutes in a tranquil, silent and invisible rain of gamma rays on the roof of Unit # 3.
Ruins of Reactor # 4
In 1991, the Soviet Union has collapsed. Since then, some things have changed: generals became members of parliament , communists became democrats, Komsomol leaders became businessmen. What became of the people who once trusted to their leaders and went out to clean up area around the reactor? Each one, left alone with his or her own cancer, knows that he or she will die and after his or her death, the toll of victims will still remain at.. 31 !!!
