Today at 00:23
In April 1986, Oleksiy Ananenko and two other station workers plunged into radioactive water to open the water tank valves of the partially destroyed fourth reactor of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Their task was to prevent another disaster in the flooded basement of the reactor.
This moment was recreated in the Chernobyl mini-series. The screenwriters suggest that the divers will die shortly after navigating the radioactive waters.
One of the volunteer divers, Borys Baranov, died of a heart attack in 2005. Two others — Valeriy Bespalov and Oleksiy Ananenko, are still alive.
“Was it frightening to be there? No, there was no fear. When I worked, everything was different. I was given the assignment to do, and I could not refuse, because that was my job,” Ananenko said.
“The series shows that during the first attempts to throw sand from helicopters, the first helicopter fell. It is shown in details. It shows the accident site, where it fell. The crew, unfortunately, died. Well, it really happened, but it happened later, on Oct. 2, but not in the first days after the explosion,” Engineer at Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant 1982-86 Oleksiy Breus said.
Breus was an engineer at the fourth reactor of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. He went to work a few hours after the explosion. He was the one who made the last attempt to activate the surviving pump for the dying reactor.
“I was going for my shift and didn’t know what had happened there. Getting closer to the nuclear power plant, I saw the fourth reactor from the bus window. The phrase ‘my hair stood on end’ was not a metaphor. That was the reality, it was horror. Then I started wondering why they brought us there. It was a mass grave. But it turned out completely differently. There was a lot of work there. When I entered the block, came into a half-destroyed building, I was surprised that entire walls and even the control board remained undamaged. I spent the whole day there,” Breus said.
At the time of the accident, Serhiy Parashyn was the deputy director of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant and party secretary. He remembers that during the first hours’ nobody could understand what had happened or the scale of the tragedy.
“It’s hard to believe until you see it. Even people who saw it with their own eyes, could not believe it. This is a paradox. For example, Oleksiy Breus. He said that he went to his shift in the morning, saw graphite lying around, but still went there because he did not understand that the reactor was damaged. Everyone has guilt, even I did. I could not get over it for seven years. Guilt is such a subtle thing,” he said.
The eyewitnesses of that tragedy note, that the series conveyed the atmosphere of horror and the events that happened there very accurately, but did not preserve the sequence of events. The personalities of the characters also differ from their prototypes. There are some inaccuracies in the series. There was no fire on the roof and emergency meetings did not take place as they are shown in the series. Uliana Khomiuk did not exist at all. She is a composite portrait of all the scientists who worked to discover and establish the causes of the accident.
