How animals were killed, houses were demolished and the forest was buried: little-known facts about the Chernobyl accident

The publishing house "Alpina non-fiction" published a book by British journalist Adam Higginbotam "Chernobyl. History of the disaster ”(translator Andrei Bugaysky). Higginbotam in detail - in some cases, literally by the minute - talks about the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986 and its consequences. The author studied the materials for more than ten years: the book uses interview records, declassified archival documents, and memoirs of participants in the events. The book in 2019 was the best according to The New York Times and Time magazine. With the permission of the publisher «Medusa» publishes a fragment that talks about the struggle of the liquidators with the consequences of the disaster in Pripyat.

Photo: Shutterstock

The dogs and cats left by the running population inside the 30-km zone began to pose a health hazard in themselves - the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture was afraid of outbreaks of rabies and the plague. A meeting with starving and desperate abandoned animals with hopelessly irradiated fur was now unsafe for people.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs appealed for help to the Republican Society of Hunters and Fishers, urging 20 groups of local residents to distribute the contaminated territory among themselves and begin the elimination of all abandoned animals that they meet. Each group should consist of 10-12 hunters, accompanied by two sanitary inspectors, a police officer and a dump truck with a driver. Four mechanical excavators had to dig holes to bury dead animals. Now the silence of the Polesye plains was broken by shots: volunteer hunters chased their victims in the exclusion zone.

Over time, hardworking Ukrainian hunters would be able to get rid of the 20 farm and domestic animals that live inside the 000-kilometer zone, but killing them all was an impossible task. Some dogs managed to get out of the perimeter and were picked up and fed by the liquidators who lived in the camps. The soldiers could be nonchalant about the fact that the animals spread radiation, but at the same time gave them new nicknames suitable for the changing environment: Dose, X-ray, Gamma or Dosimeter.

The military chemists of General Pikalov in the summer of 1986 became participants in a large-scale and unprecedented experiment. Until now, Soviet nuclear scientists imagined the accident at the nuclear power plant as a short emission of radiation from a damaged reactor - it could not be long and had to stop before the start of decontamination work. Houses and buildings in the 30-kilometer zone were all contaminated with radiation in various ways - depending on the distance to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and atmospheric conditions at the moment when the cable reached them. There was no cleaning methodology that could be followed. Radiation experts were summoned from Chelyabinsk-40, their experience in cleaning the area from radiation after the Mayak accident made them unique specialists. But even they did not encounter anything like that.

At first, the chemical forces tried to simply wash everything clean. Using water guns and fire hoses, they watered livestock farms and houses with water and a decontamination solution SF-2U. But, when the solution was absorbed into the ground, the fallout concentrated and the radioactive contamination of the soil near the buildings more than doubled, so that the top layer had to be removed with bulldozers. Some materials were washed more difficult, for example, tiled walls, and reinforced concrete remained as dirty as before washing, had to be brushed to remove at least some radionuclides. In the courtyards and gardens, the top layer of the earth was removed and collected in heaps - they were covered with a layer of clay and sown with grass. The most polluted soil was taken out and buried in dug holes. Many settlements deactivated twice or thrice, houses that were difficult to decontaminate, demolished. Over time, entire villages were demolished by bulldozers and buried, only triangular metal signs with a shamrock - a symbol of radiation hazard, remind of them.

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Military chemists did everything they could to remove radionuclides from buildings and soil: soldiers prepared a solution of polyvinyl alcohol in field kitchens - they treated the walls, drying them, they captured dirt and turned into a film that could be peeled off the walls. Roadsides were poured with bitumen so that dust stuck to it, and - kilometer by kilometer - they laid new asphalt where the highway surface could not be cleaned. On Mi-8 helicopters, large barrels of glue were installed and sprayed to capture radioactive particles on the ground. Specialists of the Research and Design Institute of Installation Technology of the Ministry of Environment (NIKIMT) looked at all enterprises of the Union for any means of binding dust, if only they were cheap and available in large quantities. During the summer, everything from PVA glue to bards - beet pulp and woodworking waste - was delivered by rail cars to the perimeter of the zone and sprayed from helicopters like thick, dark rain.

Radiation threatened the rivers, lakes and reservoirs of Ukraine, and Soviet engineers and hydrologists showed utmost ingenuity. Called to the zone from Moscow and Kiev, from the first days after the explosion, they fought so that the fall did not fall into Pripyat, that they did not seep into the groundwater, so that the pollution that had already got into the river, the stream did not carry to Kiev and a huge reservoir, supplying the city with drinking water. The brigades of the military and builders of the Union Ministry of Land Reclamation and Water Management built 131 new dams, dug 177 drainage wells and began work on creating an underground clay wall - 5 km long, up to 1 m thick and 30 m deep. The wall was supposed to prevent the entry of contaminated water into the river.

Closer to Pripyat, a pine forest played the role of a sanitary zone between the city and the nuclear power plant. It was along it that a train of heavy fallout erupted from the reactor in the first few days after the explosion. Forty square kilometers of forest were densely showered with beta-emitting radionuclides and received large doses of radiation - in some places up to 10 rad: vegetation in these areas died almost immediately. Ten days later, the pine trees along the main road between Pripyat and the station changed color: the needles from dark green turned copper-red. But the soldiers and scientists who skipped along this road at a speed did not need to look into the inspection slots of armored vehicles to find out that they had entered the Red Forest; even beyond the thickness of the armor and bulletproof glass, the hands of the radiometers began to rush around, showing extreme levels of pollution. The forest posed such a threat that soon pine trees were cut down and buried in concrete cemeteries.

Collective farm fields plowed deep, turning the top layer of the earth and moving radionuclides deeper into the soil. Scientists brought about 200 species of plants, trying to establish which ones absorb radiation better. Fields were covered with limestone and other types of calcium in powder in order to chemically bind strontium-90 in the soil and prevent its progress along the food chain. Experts gave an optimistic forecast that agriculture in the zone could be resumed in a year.

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But where the leaves on the trees and the ground underfoot were sources of ionizing radiation, the purification turned into Sisyphus labor. The weakest summer breeze again raised dust with alpha and beta particles into the air, every rain washed radiation from the clouds, and long-lived isotopes fell into ponds and streams, and with the advent of autumn, radioactive leaves covered the ground. Pripyat swamps - one of the largest swamps in Europe - like a gigantic sponge absorbed strontium and cesium, and the area of ​​agricultural land was too large to even be scraped off by earthmoving equipment divisions. Only 10 square meters were completely decontaminated. km zone. For its cleaning, 600 million tons of the topsoil would have to be removed and buried. Even for the USSR, with its seemingly endless human resources, this was an impossible task.

By early June, the 30-kilometer zone looked like a battlefield with radioactivity. Traces of the fighting - abandoned cars, damaged equipment, zigzag trenches and large dumps of land - surrounded the Chernobyl station. But while dosimetrists in protective suits roamed around the neighborhood, and helicopters flew over them in the sky, the expelled residents of Pripyat tried to return to their homes. The authorities were faced with the problem of looting, and each person had something that urgently needed to be taken away from home. Some left documents, others - large amounts of money, someone just needed everyday things. Only on one day on June 6, officers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine stopped and turned back 26 former residents of Pripyat who were trying to go through checkpoints or cross the perimeter of the restricted area.

Finally, on June 3, the chairman of the government commission ordered an end to attempts to make Pripyat inhabited again. The order came into force immediately. For the city executive committee of Pripyat, they found a temporary building on Sovetskaya Street in the city of Chernobyl. A few days later, a KGB officer found Maria Protsenko. He had a service in Afghanistan, and - unlike many of his colleagues - he surprised her with politeness and a warm attitude. He told Mary that he needed help creating a new map of Pripyat. In addition, the city will be surrounded by a fence, and her advice is also required here. Expanding her map at a scale of 1: 2000, Protsenko sketched another copy, and together they began to determine where the border of the city’s fence would go: including the main buildings, but excluding the cemetery, avoiding places where excavation could damage pipes and electric cables important for urban infrastructure . Maria asked questions: how soldiers will dig holes and hammer poles, what equipment to use. She told herself that they simply protect the city from thieves and looters.

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On June 25, the engineering units of the 72th Motor Rifle Division arrived in Pripyat - with barbed wire bays, wooden poles and tractors equipped with huge drills. Since they had to work in the high radiation zone, they acted with astonishing speed, and after 20 hours the task was completed: the beloved atomic town Protsenko was behind a two-meter fence, consisting of 9,6 strands of barbed wire. Armed guards patrolled XNUMX km of its perimeter. Soon, a centralized electronic signal system was installed inside the perimeter, created by the Special Technical Department and instrument-makers of the Ministry of Environment to prevent intruders from entering the city.

Along the border of the 30-kilometer zone, military builders through the swamps, forests and rivers of Ukraine and Belarus laid a clearing from 10 to 20 m wide. They built bridges and buried drainage pipes. Wild dogs ran through the fields of uncompressed wheat while people drove 70 poles into the ground and pulled 000 million m of barbed wire between them. In some places, the radiation level was so high that the zone was expanded, its perimeter was changed to capture new “hot” areas of pollution. By June 4, a 24-kilometer fence with alarms protected the entire exclusion zone. The city of Pripyat and the Chernobyl nuclear power plant were in the center of a huge unpopulated area of ​​195 square meters. km patrolled by units of the Internal Troops. Access here was permitted only by passes.

Nevertheless, Maria Protsenko continued to firmly believe in the position of the party leadership: the evacuation was a temporary measure. One day - maybe not soon, but sometime in the future - a spot of radiation from the city will be wiped away, and she and her family will be allowed to return to their house on the river bank.

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