Today, the 14th of December, it's the official day of the liquidators.
In 1986, over 650 000 people, most of them men, helped in trying to alleviate the effects of the Chernobyl disaster, working to avoid that the effects grew into larger, uncontrollable proportions and to clean up the big mess afterwards. Many of them died a slow, painful death.
So let's all spend our thoughts on, and give our thanks to all those men without whom we would live in a very different world.
To all the brave firefighters, soldiers, pilots, drivers, sanitary workers, people who worked on the roof of the fourth reactor, those who built the sarcophagus, and to everyone else participating (no one shall be forgotten); there are really not enough words to express the importance of your work, but the whole world owes you a big
THANK YOU!
Hi, first I came across your site, looking for info about the Firefighters of Chernobyl. I think what you are doing is amazing and truly needed. I am from the US, and finding info about the victims and their stories is hard, it seems that all the info in English is about the Plant and what went wrong. I do not know if this is the right place but as most of the links on your site seem to be in a different language, and I figured out how to do this, I am putting it here. I would like to help. Crystal
SvaraRaderaHello Crystal,
SvaraRaderaThanks for your message and for your good words. Yes, it's true that many links here are directed to pages in other languages, but that's because of the fact that there are no sources for the same in English. In order to provide some measure of "good journalism" I still want to link to the sites where I found my information so that people can look up these sources as well, because maybe they know Russian/use online translators and want to find out more or maybe they just want to make sure that I'm not just making things up here. When writing about facts, it's always important to state your sources.
You're right - in "the west" there are not much information going around concerning the victims of Chernobyl and that, I fear, has made a lot of people forget about the impact of the disaster. In Ukraine, the surviving liquidators are still fighting for their right to live a decent normal life and be treated as human beings, but they're more or less ignored by their own government (I've written about this as well) but their needs are not spoken about anywhere else in the world at all, so another important thing is to make people aware of what is going on, and that many of the liquidators are still alive and not just dead characters of a tragic past. Pretty much the same goes for many people living in Belarus and other places affected by large amounts of Chernobyl fallout. Even to this day, many children of Belarus are forced to drink Strontium-90 polluted milk just because they simply don't have anything else. The disaster has indeed affected large parts of eastern Europe and it really isn't over yet...
Hi there,
SvaraRaderaI own the blog www.chernobyl.tv. However, I no longer have time to run it.
Would you be interested in taking it over?
Please let me know your thoughts.
Kind regards,
Jamie Dabrowiecki
Hi, I was wondering if I'd be able to talk to you privately about Chernobyl, do you have an email address? I've searched all over the blog but Blogspot doesn't appear to allow direct messaging for some reason.
SvaraRaderaI've been an avid reader of your blog for quite a long time, during which I've been writing a short book about Chernobyl, and I'd very much like to use your expertise on the matter, if I may.
My email address is: leatherbarrowa@gmail.com if you're interested.