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Carrying candles,
groups gathered in the town of Chernobyl after midnight at the exact time
the nuclear plant's fourth reactor exploded to pray in memory of the
so-called liquidators, the emergency teams rushed to the scene to
extinguish the fire. The blast at 1:23
am on April 26, 1986 spewed a radioactive cloud high into the atmosphere,
burning for 10 days and spreading radioactive material over three-quarters
of Europe. More than 650,000
liquidators were sent to deal with the disaster, most of them wearing just
plastic suits and gas-masks for protection. The explosion and
subsequent radiation killed 25,000 people in Ukraine alone, according to
official figures. International organizations have said the true toll was
probably much higher. In the capital
Kiev, local leaders visited a monument to the Chernobyl firefighters
shortly after 1:00 am to place wreaths there. President Leonid Kuchma
visited the memorial on Friday. Later Saturday,
around 50 people, most widows of firefighters who died, attended a requiem
mass. Seventeen years
on, some 320,000 of the firefighters suffer from health problems related
to the radiation, and thyroid cancers have shown a marked increase.
Their pensions
"have lost 16 percent of their value since the mid-1990s, and they
now receive on average just 220 hryvnias (37 euros, 41 dollars) a
month," said Yury Andreyev, head of a non-government organisation
devoted to the firefighters' welfare. Arrears in
payments to the firefighters amount to some 720 million hryvnias (123
million euros). "Every year
I lose some of the friends I worked with over there. They die of lung
cancer or leukemia. If I had it to do over again, I'd never go and work
there," said Valery Navoichik, 67. The bitterness is
all the keener now that formerly secret Soviet files revealed this week
that "deficiencies" in Chernobyl's third and fourth reactors had
been detected as early as 1984. Moreover since
its closure in December 2000, Chernobyl has continued to pose a threat to
the environment. Officials
admitted this week that the concrete shield hastily built around the
stricken reactor after the blast was crumbling and could collapse,
releasing a 160-tonne radioactive magma into the air. A new
20,000-tonne steel casing around the crumbling shield is to be built to
absorb any leaked radiation over the next century, with construction due
to begin in late 2003 and lasting four to five years. Nearly six
million people still live in contaminated areas, including 2.3 million
Ukrainians, 1.8 million people in neighbouring regions of Russia and 1.6
people in Belarus, according to United Nations figures. In Moscow,
environmental activists demonstrated outside the Russian atomic energy
ministry to protest at the lack of protection or rehabilitation measures
offered to people living in the areas bordering northern Ukraine. Around 600
villages are located in contaminated areas of Russia, the Greenpeace
activists said, as quoted by the Interfax news agency. Several of the
activists wore chemical protection suits. The Russian
ecology group Ecodefence called on Moscow in a statement to shut down its
nuclear reactors and scrap plans to import nuclear waste. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
