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ANTONY BUTTS |
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ADVENTURES IN THE DEATH ZONE  |
A peek through a window
showed a full morgue
By ANTONY BUTTS
Special for TheColumnists.com
The accident had taken place at about one o’clock in the morning, and Dr. Ludmila Matveeva was sleeping at her home in Pripyat. The telephone rang and the caller startled her with his order. Her services were urgently required. A few minutes later, she was hurriedly making her way through the darkness to the medical clinic near Chernobyl, less than a kilometre away from the reactor complex. She noticed a red glow in the sky--“like a sunset”, she recalls--and she was naturally concerned. But when she arrived at the clinic there was no time for a briefing. The KGB officer in charge was taking no questions. “Just treat the wounded,” he ordered.
A few hours later, residents of the area saw this same red glow, by now more pronounced. From one angle, the ruins of reactor No. 4 were framed by the rising sun. Very few believed that a serious accident could happen at Chernobyl and even fewer had any idea just how dangerous it was. Some stopped to look at the fire engulfing the reactor and as the morning wore on they watched helicopters drop loads of sand and boron on the flames. The locals had no way of knowing that radiation levels where they were standing were by then millions of times normal levels and rising at astonishing rates. While not guaranteeing a fatal dose, every minute spent under such conditions was adding to their chances of getting cancer.
I am now sitting in London, eager to see what had become of Chernobyl 20 years later. I wanted to pay a visit to the scene of the world’s only nuclear meltdown so far. I picked up the telephone and dialed a number in Vienna. “Hello,” I said, trying to sound busy and important. “I am calling from a UK television production company. We are researching a documentary on Chernobyl for the Discovery Channel.”
Actually, I had never spoken to the Discovery Channel, and the production company consisted of … well, just me. I had undergone a two-week intensive documentary film school and was eager to get out there and make my first film. The 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster was coming up in April and I thought time for this project was ripe. I speak a bit of Russian but I was going to need some inside help. Worse, I had no journalistic credentials, so permission might be difficult to obtain. I decided to go straight to the top.
My call was to the International Atomic Energy Agency. I was quickly passed on to the press office. Luckily, Chernobyl was on their mind. They had just released a report on the accident, which claimed that the radioactive emissions had not been as catastrophic for the environment as expected. In fact wildlife was flourishing there, if only because now there were no humans to mess it up. I ventured that this would make a very interesting story--maybe nuclear power is not all that bad. The IAEA press man made interested noises in a German accent and I went for it: “All we need,” I said, “is access to the Exclusion Zone so that we may film the interesting science and the resurgence of wildlife in the region.” He was cooperative and I was soon on my way.
From the very onset of this catastrophic accident, information has been hard to come by. As the reactor burned in April of 1986, the authorities acted uncertainly. They needed to evacuate the city but they also needed time to organize an orderly exodus. To their credit, when the city was finally cleared almost two days later it was done in a matter of hours.
When I recently looked at archive video footage of the town in those final days of Chernobyl’s life, I could see people walking calmly around the city, looking unconcerned. I gazed at the grainy shots of dirty yellow evacuation buses, columns of them stretching down Chernobyl’s streets. A few soldiers in gas masks were caught on camera advising some moustachioed men, but there was not a lot of action. No panic, no apparent human drama.
More disturbing were the brilliant diamond-like flashes whiting out whole lengths of the videotape. Sometimes there were many of these blips a second. Each flash was the mark of a gamma ray hitting the film. The amateur cameraman who had shot the footage stayed on after the evacuation to film the desolation. This decision cost him his life, for the radiation was steadily accumulating and, although only 30 years old, he died of cancer a few years later. If these flashes could wipe whole sections of film, I could only imagine what they would do to human cells.
Now in the winter of 2006, I am finally in “The Zone” near Chernobyl and Dr. Matveeva is reliving that period for me. "Over 200 people were brought in, covered in debris from the explosion and suffering from radiation and fire burns," she recalls with some emotion.
Official Chernobyl, not wanting to admit the full scale of the distaster, at first reported only two dead and 197 hospitalized. But very soon there was no space in the morgue in Pripyat or Chernobyl. “The KGB did not want me to see, but I managed to get a glimpse through the window of the Pripyat morgue that night and it was full.”
As she worked desperately through the night,
she, too, began to feel the effects of the radiation. “My
eyes felt like they were full of sand like on the beach,”
she told me, her voice breaking. Despite what she had seen, officially
there was still no “disaster”. Her two 6-year-old twins
and 11-year-old daughter went to school as normal. Eventually
the whole family was diagnosed with radiation poisoning. I asked
Dr. Matveeva how she feels now almost 20 years later. “We
are happy,” she said, “We did not get cancer. We survived
and are grateful for each moment we are alive.” She received
the Soviet Red Star for her heroism.
Some were not so lucky. Algirdas Peushtaras was one of the army
conscripts sent to Chernobyl in the aftermath of the accident.
He told me his first month and a half of duty there was nothing
special: normal army activities such as erecting tents and shelters.
But then on October 1, 1986, more than five months after the
explosion, he and 140 others were marched to the reactor site.
The so-called sarcophagus, No. 4 reactor, smothered in sand and
concrete, was almost complete at this time. His orders were to
help remove graphite and other radioactive debris from the top
of the reactor. They were told that radiation was very high--600-1,000
Roentgens per hour, a potentially lethal dose--but they were
given no choice.
They operated in groups of four and were
warned that they must spend no more than two minutes on the roof,
it was so “hot”. By way of protection, he was issued
a paper facemask, another mask for his eyes, and a pair of ordinary
rubber gloves. How much impact those two minutes would make to
his life he was soon to find out. Two days later, Peushtaras
recalled, his unit was sent back to base. He then started suffering
headaches, became weak and felt aches in his elbows and knees.
Next year, at home in Lithuania, he began to feel pain around
his thyroid. He never knew what the illness was, and doctors
could not diagnose the cause with certainty. “Everything
hurt.” What he knew was that there were thousands like him
and no money for treatment. “I have three children, but
they treated me and everyone else like human rubbish,” he
told me. “We were something to use and then throw away.”
Doctors told him he had five years to live, that he would soon
die of a cancer of some sort. He became depressed and virtually
lost the will to live. I asked him about drinking: “Of course
I drank. We all drank, to forget.” He split up with his
wife in 1989 and seven years later tried two or three times to
commit suicide. His illness eventually abated, 15 years after
those two minutes. He still does not know precisely what his
illness was, just that it was like what thousands of others have
gone through. Even today he is in pain. “Now, nobody cares
about the people who cleaned up Chernobyl,” he said.
(Antony Butts' account continues in the next edition of TheColumnists)
©2006 by Antony Butts All rights reserved. TheColumnists.com
wishes to acknowledge the special assistance of EYE ON EUROPE
Columnist Michael Johnson in arranging the publication of Mr.
Butts' series on this website. This chapter first posted April
19, 2006.
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