Twenty-nine years ago, during the early hours of April 26, 1986, the nuclear power plant at Chornobyl, located nearly 60 miles north of Kyiv, experienced what many Western experts called the worst nuclear accident in history. The initial report of the incident was released by Soviet authorities two days after the nuclear catastrophe.
At the time, United Press International reported that a resident of Kyiv said the deaths had surpassed the 2,000 mark, and that 10,000 to 15,000 persons were evacuated from the town of Prypiat, where nuclear plant workers and their families lived, as well as three other nearby settlements. The dead were reportedly buried at a radioactive waste site, southwest of the accident site.
Soviet authorities were silent on the extent of the radioactive fallout, saying that the fire was under control and that radiation levels were decreasing. Soviet reports also said that only two people had died as a direct result of the accident and that 197 were injured, 18 of them critically. The USSR declined to accept aid from the United States or the International Red Cross.
The initial four-sentence announcement of an incident at the plant by TASS news service on April 28 came only after authorities in Sweden detected abnormally high levels of radioactivity. Residents of Kyiv were not told about any safety precautions that they should take, such as not eating fresh produce, not drinking the water, staying indoors, taking iodine tablets. However, in Poland, children and pregnant women were given iodine in liquid and tablet form, and told not to drink milk from grass-fed cows, or eat fresh produce.
Western news media were barred from entering Kyiv and the area near the nuclear plant. On May 1 Western media learned that one of the of the nuclear reactors at Chornobyl had experienced a meltdown, and a second reactor was threatened, and that a graphite fire was continuing to spew radioactivity into the air.
European governments condemned Soviet authorities for not immediately announcing the accident and for not being forthright with information about the extant of the disaster. The U.S. government issued travel warnings for Americans not to travel to Kyiv. (Easter according to the Julian calendar was celebrated on May 4 that year.)
Phone calls to Ukraine by Ukrainians in the U.S. and Canada were unable to be completed, with The Weekly being told on May 1 that this was due to the high volume of calls to the Soviet Union.
On May 1 the winds began to shift, and it was unclear where the fallout from the radioactive cloud would be dumped. Instead of hitting nearby Kyiv in the south, the majority of the radioactive cloud settled in northern Ukraine, Belarus and the nearby part of Russia.
As the Ukrainian community absorbed the news, many in the diaspora expressed concern that the full effects of the nuclear catastrophe would not become known until years later, with the long-term effects on the land, water and people. The area around Chornobyl was feared to be uninhabitable for decades.
Many forms of illness, including forms of cancer, have been attributed to the Chornobyl catastrophe, but the exclusion zone area around Chornobyl has seen a re-birth in the ecological diversity despite the contamination. Work by international organizations continues to address these associated health issues as well as contain the remains of the nuclear plant within a sealed “New Safe Confinement” sarcophagus that is under construction and set for completion later in 2015.
Source: “Nuclear disaster in Ukraine, Up to 15,000 feared dead,” The Ukrainian Weekly, May 4, 1986.