The Battle of Chernobyl Page #5

It is estimated that a fourth of these men died before the age of 40.

2,500 lives lost that don't appear in any official statistic.

While the miners are still digging below the reactor, Hans Blix with Soviet authorities organizes a press conference in Moscow.

Let me say that on behalf of the IAEA, we have expressed profound regret at the tragic accident.

The loss of lives and the damage which has been caused.

We have now agreed with the Soviet authorities to come to Vienna for a post-accident analysis...

In front of 500 journalists from all over the world, he announces an international conference that will be held in Vienna,

where the Soviets have agreed to share all their data on the disaster.

The most important effect of the press conference was that the Russian people felt that we can believe these guys.

They were used to having a government that they did not believe one word in, and accidents and disasters were usually suppressed.

They didn't inform about them, so what they heard about this just kept them worried, that it may be even worse.

I was it was bad enough to be sure,

but they felt that these guys we trust, so this was a victory for Glasnost.

The Soviets agree to cooperate fully with the West.

A historic change that begins an era of openness, which became known as Glasnost.

A political victory for Gorbatchev, who sorely needs it.

Because in Chernobyl, although the fire is now being kept in check, the breach and tons of highly radioactive rubble lie exposed to the elements.

It is of the utmost urgency to cover the broken structure and clean up the zone.

But for that, more men will be needed - many more men.

18 days after the disaster, Gorbatchev finally addresses the Soviet people.

The entire country was mobilized.

No bureaucratic formalities.

If someone had what we needed, we took it.

No formalities.

We'd worry about the cost later.

We took whatever we needed, it was a front-line situation.

General Nikolai Tarakanov is sent to command the land troops.

In one year, a hundred thousand soldiers and officers passed through Chernobyl.

They were all reservists.

They were summoned up by top administration in their cities and sent to the front.

Military personnel or civilians, officers or simple soldiers, all of them are "liquidators", a term invented for the Battle of Chernobyl.

Their mission:
clean up - liquidate - the radioactivity.

Igor Kostine was one of five war reporters authorized by the Kremlin to cover the battle.

A first in a country that kept everything hidden.

Three of his colleagues are now dead.

There were no titles.

No ministers, generals or soldiers.

No one was saying, "I'm a general, do what I say..." Everyone was honestly doing what they could.

And so they were be name "the liquidation of the Chernobyl accident" was set in motion.

100,000 troops as well as 400,000 civilians, workers, engineers, nurses, doctors and scientists from every Soviet republic pass through Chernobyl.

The Soviet Union is waging its last major battle.

Five hundred thousand people.

The troops in Chernobyl were bigger than Napoleon's.

But our army got contaminated.

From the sky, helicopters drop tons of a sticky liquid dubbed "burba": a mixture that coagulates and plasters the radioactive dust to the ground.

Meanwhile, brigades of liquidators are put in charge of cleaning up the zone and, house by house, of removing the layer of radioactive dust that covers everything.

Special hunting squads were formed.

They patrolled the countryside and forests with rifles, killing cats and dogs.

All the animals have to be killed, because when they wandered through highly contaminated zones, their fur soaked up the radioactivity.

They could contaminate the liquidators.

"A man is living in this house. Do not destroy..."

The last villages with people still remaining in the zone are evacuated.

The houses are knocked down one by one and buried.

At night, the trucks and the machines, and the men, are covered in radioactive dust.

We would wash five to six times in the shower.

We helped each other.

We used a hemp glove and the roughest soap available.

We scrubbed away.

We put on new clothes, then we ate.

We ate really well there,

...because you need to keep your strength up to fight the ionizing radiation.

Ionizing radiation seeks out the weak spots in your body.

That's where it finds a way in and knocks you out.

Around the plant, a colossal operation is set in motion.

It goes on 7 days a week without a single day off.

300,000 cubic meters of contaminated earth are bulldozed into huge ditches and covered over with cement.

This spot, around the 4th reactor, is where the most dangerous missions of the zone took place.

Eight weeks after the explosion, the liquidators tackle the heart of the problem:

in order to neutralize the toxic waste for the long-term and prevent it from spreading even more, the entire blown-out reactor has to be isolated.

Lev Bolchakov was one of the engineers who designed the enormous structure that would entirely cover the fourth reactor.

A "sarcophagus" of steel and concrete 170 meters long and 66 meters high.

It was a one-of-a-kind and unique project.

No one had ever built such a structure in a zone this radioactive.

You could only work a few minutes at a time.

That had never been done before.

It is an enormous challenge: How do you build a monumental structure in a place

where humans can work for only a few minutes, or even just seconds, at a time?

This utterly new situation will require more improvisation from the liquidators, and put more lives at risk.

It has now been more than 12 weeks since the initial blast at Block number 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

To stop the deadly contamination, the final attack is launched.

Radioactivity in this sector is so high that only remote-controlled machines can be sent in.

But people will have to get the machines into position.

Workers can only stay a few minutes without receiving a fatal dose of radiation.

With each second, their lives are more and more threatened.

Here's one of the armored vehicles.

It looks primitive, but we had to build them ourselves.

We lined the cabs entirely with lead to protect our soldiers from the radiation as best we could.

Each metallic piece of the structure is prefabricated, sometimes hundreds of kilometers away, then brought one by one onto the site for assembly.

An extraordinary jigsaw puzzle: Beams 150 tons and 70 meters long.

Buttresses 45 meters high.

That's the DEMAC 4000.

Look at the size of this crane.

We couldn't work very long on the site and there was no room for error.

The slightest miscalculation and it would have been impossible to fit it all together.

Despite the extreme conditions, work progresses.

100,000 cubic meters of cement are used to make the structure.

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