Life beneath the lingeringcloud of Chernobyl
At about 3pm on the last Monday in April 1986, a mass of black clouds
unleashed a sudden downpour on the sleepy western Russian town of
Novozybkov, sending participants in a rehearsal for that year's May Day
parade running for cover.
The wind was strong, and the rain an
unusually torrential, 40-minute downpour, but Sergei Sizov, a professor
at the local teacher-training college, thought nothing of it until
delivering a lesson the next day on one of the more outlandish
responsibilities of educators in the Soviet Union - detecting and
responding to nuclear and chemical attack.
"The class was called
'nuclear and chemical reconnaissance', and it basically involved showing
[students] how to use a military grade Geiger counter," he said. "It
was just something everyone was meant to know, like stripping a
Kalashnikov."
But instead of registering the expected trace of
background radiation, the dial surged to levels Sizov had only seen in
text books about nuclear attack.
Alarmed and confused, he immediately called the local civil protection headquarters.
"All they said was 'that's impossible'. They didn't know anything about it."
As
it turned out, it was worse than possible. Three days earlier, on
Saturday, April 26, 1986, the nuclear power station at Chernobyl, just
over 160km away in what is now Ukraine, had exploded in one of the worst
nuclear accidents in history. That Monday's rainstorm was exactly the
kind of disaster that Sizov's training had been designed to detect.
Nestled
on the border where Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine meet, the marshy birch
forests and vast, flat fields of Novozybkovsky district in the Bryansk
region are about as close as you can get to the heart of old Russia.
Data: 11.04.2016
Fonte: www.nzherald.co.nz
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