Chernobyl Half-Life Memories

Introduction:

In April 1993, a group of us went to Chernobyl to make a TV documentary, exactly seven years after the devastating accident at the nuclear power plant.

Except, we didn't actually go to Chernobyl – and that really is the heart & soul of the story.

The infamous power station is in the former Soviet Republic of the Ukraine, just south of its border with Belarus. But the prevailing winds and weather conditions in April of 1986 meant that 70% of the fallout and contamination from Chernobyl drifted north, into Belarus and beyond. They were the ones who suffered the most, but got little or nothing of the attention or the aid, because officially it didn't happen to them.

Officially, a lot of things didn't happen: that was part of the problem – the Soviet reluctance to acknowledge the disaster, deal with its consequences, or even inform its citizens and its neighbours of a devastating radioactive dust cloud moving across Europe.

Which is why we went to Belarus, not the Ukraine: to witness the story that 'didn't happen'. Seven of us spent three weeks there, with interpreters and drivers; much of it we spent on the edges of or inside the 30km exclusion zone that surrounded the 'Ground Zero' of Chernobyl. It was a disturbing, surreal and deeply affecting experience, full of humanity, heartache and humour, which remains with me as a series of vivid yet disconnected memories, 26 years later – a half-life ago.

Chernobyl Reactor No.4

Chernobyl Half-Life Memories

I remember all of us going beforehand to a department in University College Dublin, to have a full body scan that measured our 'base' radiation levels. Then, we were each issued with little blue radiation-detecting badges which we were told to wear at all times… I think we'd lost most of them before we even left for Belarus.

We flew from Shannon: there was a scheduled Aeroflot service from Miami to Minsk, which re-fuelled in Co. Clare. Next to my exit row seat, bolted onto the cabin wall, was a box labelled “Emergency Rope” - was that to escape with or hang myself by? I remember that the inflight meal was one surly stewardess with a bag of apples, followed by another offering white or brown vodka. We'd never heard of brown vodka. Three weeks later, we never wanted to see it again.

Our trip was sponsored by Dunne's Stores, and to this day, I will never hear a bad word said about them. They gave us boxes of tinned fish, crackers, pot noodle, cup-a-soup, chocolate bars and crates of water, which allowed us to avoid the fear of eating contaminated food in dangerous areas surrounding Chernobyl. And they gave us disposable clothes – multiple sets of T-shirts, socks, underwear, sweatpants and sweatshirts. These were to be worn any time we went into the radioactive 'Exclusion Zone', and to be destroyed immediately afterwards. It might have been over-cautious, but it helped re-assure our loved ones back at home that we were at least taking precautions in the face of certain radioactive death. And that we would die wearing clean Dunne's Stores underwear.

And I can remember burning those clothes… or at least trying to. We had returned from a day in the villages within the 'Exclusion Zone' surrounding the abandoned power station. We had scrubbed ourselves clean and were drinking warm beer and brown vodka. We had decided (in retrospect, rather melodramatically) to burn our paper dust suits, masks and Dunne's Stores outfits in a barrel at the back of our hotel. Except, local kids quite rightly took exception to us destroying perfectly good clothes that had only been worn once. So they plucked them from the smoking barrel. And we had to run after them to retrieve them. Or more precisely, Donal ran after them.

Donal Gilligan was our cameraman. I remember the Benny Hill comedy of him, panicking and laughing with a bottle of beer in hand, chasing a bunch of fit, wiry teenagers who were wearing our oversized Dunne's Stores sweatshirts and pants. Donal died way too young in 2010, and my fondest memories of him revolve around those three weeks in Belarus.

One night, Donal and myself 'burnt' our day's work together: we had used some out-of-date rolls of film to take slow motion shots of both the power station and a memorial flame in the centre of Minsk. We wanted the footage to feel 'radioactive', so we took the film out of its can and held it up to expose it to the light of a bare ceiling bulb, and then left it on a sunlit windowsill for a few minutes. We were laughing slightly manically – a roll of film was worth more than a hundred quid - worried about taking a creative risk, mindless of being in the most contaminated radioactive zone on earth. Ultimately, the footage looked amazing. Thanks, Donal.

I remember lying to Donal, and to everyone in the van. We were in the 'Exclusion Zone', driving through a forest on our way to the border with the Ukraine, where we would finally be able to see and film the Chernobyl Power Plant. I was in charge of the Geiger counter. Forests were some of the most radioactive places within the exclusion zone, because the trees and leaves trapped some of the most dangerous dust, debris and particles immediately after the disaster. Driving at speed through the canopy of the forest, everyone kept asking me, as I sat up front staring at the Geiger counter, “what is it reading now?”. “Yeah, it's getting a bit high”, I replied. It was nearly off the scale.

The most overwhelming memory I have is of the abandoned houses: beds still made, pots of food on the stove, family photos on the wall, calendars still turned to April 28, 1986 (it took at least two days for the authorities to acknowledge – even to locals – that a catastrophe had happened and that villages needed to be evacuated).

Most of the houses had been looted. One or two streets still had residents who refused to leave, or who had returned illegally years after the disaster to reclaim their property, their land, and their lives. The head of one family sat, in floods of tears, on the doorstep of his dilapidated wooden house, crying while literally picking up and eating the soil, to prove to us how much his home meant to him. Admittedly, he was completely hammered. And I remember that was a recurring theme across the three weeks we were there. Or, there are bits of it I remember...

The Day of the Dead

On the annual 'Day of the Dead', the authorities allowed evacuees back into the exclusion zone for 12 hours to visit the graveyards and remember lost family members. Flowers, food, cigarettes and vodka were laid out on the graves for the dead to enjoy. And the living got stuck in too. We filmed as the day progressed, and the wailing & weeping & keening rose like a chorus of banshees – old women prostrate on the graves of loved ones; men reduced to blubbering wrecks, hugging each other as they passed around a bottle. It was a visceral celebration of life and death, and we all felt it. It was very Irish.

I remember I woke up in a ditch after a wedding. We had filmed a young couple's big day as a symbol of hope and of fear for the future. Donal photographed them on a very long lens, walking down the road together, the heat haze of the scorching sun making the tarmac shimmer and the happy couple melt radioactively into the horizon. Later, at the wedding party, they treated us as valued guests, fed us wonderfully and took great pleasure in getting us hammered on local moonshine. We didn't complain.

Within the Exclusion Zone

Entering the Exclusion Zone

As we spent time in and around the contaminated exclusion zone, we began to understand that life went on, because the locals insisted that it must: the initial catastrophic doses of radiation were fatal for those in the power station at the time of the explosion, and for the brave firefighters who were sent in to deal with it. The short-lived radioactive isotopes which spread in the plumes of smoke and dust were equally fatal, or caused irreparable cell damage to human, animal and plant life that would kill them within weeks, months or years. But seven years later, the concern wasn't that we would be subjected to fatally high doses of radiation – the real danger we witnessed was people who were still part of the daily food chain: ploughing the fields, drinking the local water, eating the local animals, harvesting the local vegetables, all fed & nurtured in contaminated soil & streams. That was the invisible, insidious threat – but because it was invisible, people couldn't understand why they were not allowed to go back to their homes and their land.

Measuring radiation at the market

We filmed in a market in the village of Hoiniki which lies on the edge of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. Before farmers could sell their produce they had to have it scanned by a government official, using an ancient army-issue radiation detector. If he approved and stamped a form, they were allowed sell their fruit, vegetables or meat. At times, I wasn't even sure the radiation detector was plugged in, and approvals were often stamped with a nod and a wink. Any food bartered, exchanged with neighbours or kept for the family was not subjected to any radiation measurement.

The thyroid ward

The thyroid ward

I remember a wheezing ward full of pale-faced children, with bandages over their throats, desperately trying to catch their breath. They had just had their thyroids removed. They were literally speechless, as were we – it shook us to the core. It was horrifying. When the power station exploded, one of the most deadly radioactive isotopes to escape in the plume of dust and smoke was Iodine 131. It has a very short half-life, just 8 days. Your thyroid gland needs stable iodine, and harvests it naturally from a healthy diet. But if you don't have a healthy diet, then your thyroid is starved of iodine and takes it greedily from wherever it can. The children around Chernobyl had appalling diets. When the dust cloud enveloped the surrounding area, their thyroids, hungry for iodine, gladly absorbed the radioactive version. I remember when Ireland was issued with iodine tablets, and we laughed at the feeble effort being made by the government minister involved. But if the children of Belarus had been given access to those same iodine tablets, and had been warned immediately, not 3 days later, it might have saved them from the situation we found them in: breathlessly trying to explain to us the trauma they had endured and the future they faced, through no fault of their own.

We filmed in many hospital wards: one, hidden far from public attention, was full of children with birth deformities: they were not all categorically a direct result of Chernobyl, but the incidence of physical complications had risen dramatically since the nuclear accident. What was equally overwhelming was the fear in the eyes of expectant and new mothers, anxious about their babies and their future. One of my most vivid memories is a shot filmed by Donal, of a newborn baby being tightly swaddled in the traditional soviet style by one of the midwives. It is an image of hope and fear all wrapped up in a single tiny bundle of cloth.

The Liquidators

For weeks, we drove across Belarus in a repurposed ambulance. It rattled, but that was mainly the crates of vodka (white and brown) we had stored in the back, alongside our Dunne's Stores provisions. Often, we used both as calling cards when we visited extremely difficult situations. I remember driving through an endless forest, eventually discovering hidden, overgrown gates which led onto an equally endless driveway that finally opened out and revealed a forgotten soviet-era 'rest home'. This was where they kept the 'Liquidators'. The Liquidators were the first responders: those sent in to tackle the initial explosion and blaze, with absolutely no idea what they were about to face. They came from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Today it's estimated that 60,000 died, and countless more were doomed to slowly suffer the long-term effects of their loyalty and bravery. I will never forget sitting in the room with five of them, their skin so pale it was almost transparent, their rage and anger so dark it almost blocked the sun from the sky. Many of them didn't want to speak, for fear of reprisal or their families losing a meagre yet valuable pension. I have to presume that none of them are alive today.

Minsk Tower Block

Evacuee in Minsk

Perhaps the most overwhelming day I remember was in a high-rise tower block on the outskirts of Minsk, the Capital of Belarus. This was where many of the evacuated families were moved to after the explosion. They were hated by people in the city, simply because they had jumped the government housing waiting list. And they were doubly alienated by being farming people in a barren concrete jungle – the city had no need for them or their skills. But as we sat in one of the apartments interviewing the residents, one after the other there would be a shy knock on the door and another neighbour would bring a small plate of food for us – bread, preserved meats, pickles, cheese… until the table was laden down with a meal for the visitors – they wanted to thank us for listening to them and caring. These people were not sick: they were lost, shattered, heartbroken, aimless and penniless. That was one of the hidden legacies of Chernobyl - it was, and still is, a deeply affecting memory.

Our final night in Belarus was in an old military flop-house on the outskirts of Minsk, near the airport. After three weeks of living out of each other's pockets and sleeping where we fell, our producer Liam tried to book each of us a single room. It was less than five dollars a head. The lady at reception refused point blank: it was an insultingly capitalist request since there were three perfectly good beds in each room, filled on a first come, first served basis. Being last to check in, I shared my room with two long distance lorry drivers from Moscow. At 6.30am the next morning, the speaker on the wall (with no volume control) blasted military marching music to rouse us from our beds. It was time to go home.

We arrived back in Shannon. Our great friends and employers, Ned and Maurice, who had raised the money to fund the entire project, had rented an old school bus to bring us home to Dublin. When we got on, we discovered it was full of all the loved ones we'd missed so much. The bus drove us straight to Matt the Thresher's Pub in Birdhill, where we all got completely hammered. Again.

Ironically, when we returned to University College Dublin a few days later to be re-scanned after our three week journey into the most contaminated place on earth, our 'base' radiation levels had dropped significantly, because we had all lost so much muscle weight and bone density.

Our brave & kind presenter, at the heart of it all, was Ali Hewson; our compassionate motivator was Adi Roche; our producer and our rock was Liam Cabot; our genius cinematographer was Donal Gilligan, and our mad & amazing sound recordist was Dan Birch; and luckily we brought our brilliant editor Isobel Stephenson with us to act as the shoot photographer. The executive producers, Ned O'Hanlon and Maurice Linnane, selflessly raised the money for us to go on our adventure. And we left behind in Minsk our interpreter, Irina Kouropatkina (who sings under the closing credits of the documentary) – she is now in Washington DC, and her making contact with me out of the blue this year, alongside the new Chernobyl drama on HBO & Sky, encouraged me to revisit the adventure, the memories, and the documentary, which can be viewed here:

Black Wind, White Land: Living with Chernobyl

Part 1: https://vimeo.com/29158846

Part 2: https://vimeo.com/29161233

Our interpreter Irina's lovely memories of that time are here:
https://hoboramble.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-interpreters-interpretation.html