The older generation remembers this day - April 26, 1986, exactly 30 years ago. And he remembers the first weeks after … I, for example, was 13. I, still a girl, trained with a group of climbers in the Crimea in May, mastering the rocky route of Mount Kush-Kaya near Foros. Once I heard adults discussing anxiously a gray cloud over the sea: “Isn't it radioactive? Has it not brought from THERE ….
According to the custom of that time, the questions of children were answered evasively, so I "wound up" in my head almost a nuclear war and a return to a charred house … However, it was not the adults' fault - they themselves did not know, and few knew how terrible it was this trouble is the accident at the 4th unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. And - that the heroes-firefighters prevented the worst that could happen - the explosion of the neighboring power unit and the entire station … The brave men who extinguished the roof of the turbine hall did not live even a month after the disaster (the basement of the MSCh-126, where the uniform and boots of the heroes lie, are still the most dangerous place in Pripyat, they "glow").
Sarovchanin Sergei Filippovich Shmitko works as a chief engineer in the city museum of the city of Sarov in the Nizhny Novgorod region (also, by the way, "atomicgrad", the former Arzamas-16). He talks about his participation in the liquidation of the accident for the first time in thirty years. At that time Sergei Filippovich was 33 years old … He says: “At that time I was the head of the power supply department in the construction organization US-909, and I myself did not expect that in August a telegram would come from Moscow about my trip to Chernobyl. They warned that the less things you take with you, the better. I myself did not ask to go there, but I went voluntarily … Readily. It is necessary - so it is necessary."
He did not regret not succumbing to the temptation to take an extra sweater with him - he realized that any thing after the "zone" is destructive. He is still lamenting about one thing: he did not take the camera! The passage of specialists to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was already well-established - a special cash desk worked at the Kievsky railway station in Moscow, where the ticket was issued instantly, without a hint of a queue. Half-empty train … And the morning Kiev in August did not give the impression of a residential one. There are almost no people at the station, and the roads are ironed by watering machines. Those sent to Chernobyl from Kiev traveled by train to the Teterev station …
“We lived on the basis of a pioneer camp. I was given overalls, and the first day I was engaged in the arrangement and paperwork. I got acquainted with the head of UES US-605 and the chief engineer, whose deputy I was to be, and on the second day we went to the station … I actually graduated from the institute with a degree in Power Plants. But he worked as a builder, because he was always afraid of bureaucratic office work, and in the personnel department of Arzamas-16 he asked where to live better … Until that moment, I had never been to nuclear power plants, state district power plants, hydroelectric power plants, and a thermal one - it happened. But at the atomic one - no”.
So it happened. When we approached the "zone", it was not that scary, but uncomfortable. For the first time, my interlocutor experienced such a feeling when he entered the same Arzamas-16 as a young specialist. Here was something similar. The same "thorn", the same unknown …
“The station is a huge building 700–800 m long. And the fourth power unit is like the opening mouth of a monster. The collapse, as it was called then, and the area around it was terribly "phoned" all the time, and even periodically pulsed with "emissions".
As an engineer and builder, I felt sorry for the station. She was modern, successful! Winner of all kinds of competitions. In the reception of the director in the shelves - banners and awards … There were many of them."
Summer - autumn 86th was the time when the liquidators implemented the plan for the burial of the emergency unit. The Sarcophagus was also built. Sergey Filippovich took part in this construction as a deputy chief engineer.
He continues the story: “It is difficult for me to imagine now how the firefighters worked, and it was difficult to imagine then. I saw this power unit charred and imagined it in flames … The temperature is hellish, everything is scattered around, fragments of graphite rods. And they with their hoses on the roof … Probably understood that they were giving their lives. The fire department was at the station, the people were literate, they probably knew that they had no chance to survive, they were going to their death …”.
However, in order. Sergei Filippovich says that there, at the station, for the first time in his life he saw the most modern construction equipment. Well, maybe I saw something before, but in such quantity and on one construction site - I never saw it. For example, the largest self-propelled crane "Demag" - Germany supplied these cranes, however, refusing to put specialists in the "zone" for installation (which, by the way, would not interfere, because our liquidators had to assemble them literally in an open field, and without experience - outside the Chernobyl time limits). However, our leadership also preferred not to let foreign specialists into the "zone", wishing to diminish the scale of the catastrophe in front of the whole world.
There was a lot of equipment there - truck cranes from Liebherr, radio-controlled bulldozers, loaders from Pinkerton, concrete pumps Putzmeister, Schwing, Wartington, which deliver concrete at a distance of 500 m and to a height of up to 100 m. The work went around the clock, seven days a week. People worked in four shifts - six hours each. But in fact, it turned out like this: I completed the task, received my daily 2 X-rays, and sit in the room - do not protrude.
Now it is difficult to imagine (even for the participants in this construction) how difficult it was to try to cover up the pulsating radiation volcano. “It cost nothing to kill a person there,” my interlocutor says.
They tried to spare people by counting X-rays and shortening the working time, but, as a rule, they did not work out well. Everything was interconnected - the specialists were too dependent on each other and the results to pay attention to such "little things" as time outdoors …
“We carried out work on the installation and operation of temporary power supply for construction mechanisms, communication work, on the elimination of surplus hardened concrete with the help of jackhammers and explosions. A dividing wall was installed between the 3rd and 4th blocks. And we did a lot of decontamination…”.
There was a lack of lighting. Sergei Filippovich recalls how a group of military balloonists filled and raised a balloon designed to hold the lights for a construction site. Everyone saw how the commander of the group gave the order to the soldiers, and he himself departed for the whole day "to solve food issues." And they, completely green conscripts, spent the whole day on radiation with a balloon, arousing the sympathy of the staff … But what could be done? Then there was such a system - I got my "dose" - and for demobilization.
By the way, the next day, this same lighting unit, which probably cost someone health, was found hanging on only one cable. The other two were accidentally cut off by an engineering barrage vehicle (based on the tank).
Yes, when focusing on one patch of so much technology, it was difficult to avoid such incidents. But all the same, Chernobyl of that time gave the experience of mobile and precise construction - without delays, without painful waiting for the necessary materials, without bureaucratic obstacles. It was an exemplary construction project driven by the need to save the world and the country …
What really disposed to work was that high-ranking officials came, put on the same robes, only with the badges “Deputy Minister”, “Member of the Government Commission”, “Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences”. Yes, Slavsky, Usanov, Shcherbina, Vedernikov, Maslyukov, Ryzhkov, Legasov, Velekhov - and many, many others have been there.
In general, if, again, under a microscope to look for advantages, then an extreme situation awakened human thought - much of what was done there these days was done for the first time in general. And not only in technology, electronics, science, but also in journalism. For example, at that time, cranes were used as operators, on which they hung television cameras, etc. Young lieutenants, graduates of the Moscow Institute of Chemical Technology. Mendeleev - they worked as dosimetrists and studied something along the way.
Sergei Filippovich tells how people tried to protect themselves by shooting lead sheets with construction and assembly pistols before carrying out work on particularly irradiated spots (what is not a “stalker” phenomenon?).
So, from August 1 to October 18, my interlocutor collected his 24 X-rays, but did not leave immediately - the boss asked: "Seryozha, give everything to the replacement, please …". How many X-rays were collected while transmitting, it's hard to say …
And here in Kiev, in a coffee shop on Khreshchatyk, another "stalker" case occurred. Attracted by the smell of fresh coffee, the young construction worker entered the cafe and ordered a double portion at once in order to fully enjoy the taste of the drink. And what? At the exit from the cafe, a veil suddenly fell in his eyes, he began to choke, although he had never complained about his health before. I even had to sit out on a bench, not the most pleasant half hour … I returned home by November 6, by my 34th birthday, having bought a fashion magazine for my wife in Kiev.
“Despite the fact that the danger of man-made disasters in our time, for obvious reasons, remains, I am not sure that if this happened now, everything would have been eliminated in such a time frame … After all, the whole country worked there. And they built the Sarcophagus by November 86”.
Basically, by the way, in those months specialists from the cities of the Minsredmash system worked at the station: Ust-Kamenogorsk, Stepnogorsk, Dimitrovgrad, Penza-19, Arzamas-16. There were many guys from the Ural and Siberian cities. And there were so-called "partisans" from all over the Union!"
Sergey Filippovich talks about Chernobyl - an old Ukrainian city with wooden houses, gardens and palisades. Shows at the stand of the city museum the beautiful Pripyat - a modern, compact, again - exemplary and successful city with a population of 50 thousand people. By the time my hero arrived, she was already a ghost.
And of course, even then they spoke with indignation that Pripyat stood for a day without evacuation - the children went to schools, played on the streets. And nearby, two kilometers away, the reactor was burning … Onlookers from the hill looked at the fire. And after all, someone ran to him!..
And then, in the thirty-kilometer exclusion zone, branches of apple and pear trees broke from the poured fruits, abandoned orchards screamed in pain … Herds of feral horses rushed around the "zone". Like mustangs on the prairie They shot cats and dogs in a thirty-kilometer strip … It was a pity for them, but no one wished the animals a painful death from radiation sickness - the laws of humanity also somehow mutated in the "zone" …
I ask: what is the attitude towards the veteran liquidators now? Yes, it is slowly forgotten. Nowadays, few people are interested in what isotopes you carry with you. And the diagnosis "radiation sickness" and in those days was made when "you can't get out." And now it is problematic to establish a connection between the liquidator's illnesses and work at the Chernobyl NPP, to put it mildly.
We are considering documents, certificates and certificates of honor (5 pieces) of the liquidator of the accident, the main thing is not to let the imagination run wild and not imagine that these things may still store their isotopes …
Sergei Filippovich asked not to write about the consequences of the "zone" on his health. Has inflicted.“But I’m talking with you now - thank you for that… There were many coincidences in this whole story for me. I’m a Ukrainian - it’s clear by my last name. My paternal grandmother lived in the village of Vishenki near Kiev. I just lived in Kazakhstan as a child, then studied in Samara … And so, Ukraine is the homeland of all relatives and friends. It hurts to think about the current relationship between our countries …”.
Again we look at the photos of twenty-eight firefighters … Three - Heroes of the Soviet Union: Lieutenants Kibenok and Pravik (received the title posthumously) and Major Telyatnikov. I photograph the narrator with a photograph of Leonid Telyatnikov, already a Hero, already a lieutenant colonel …
I could not resist asking the liquidator about the causes of the accident - I will not give a detailed answer about the tests at the 4th unit by the personnel of the ChNPP, I will only report the conclusion: “They were specialists, people with specialized education (not managers!) there was no malicious intent, and even more so, no desire for one's own death … A chain of tragic accidents coupled with self-confidence,”says Sergei Filippovich.
And he adds, a little later: “And, to be precise in the wording, we were not the liquidators of the accident. We were the liquidators of the catastrophe."
By the way, he had a chance to visit the Chernobyl nuclear power plant for the second time. A year later, in 1987, when he came there for equipment, participating in the construction of the Gorky nuclear heat supply station. But that is another story…