The first responders take fatal doses
1986 · Event
Firemen fight the roof fires within minutes, kicking chunks of graphite reactor core aside without being told what they are; plant workers wade through radioactive water hunting valves. Twenty-nine of the first responders die of acute radiation syndrome within weeks — the visible fraction of a toll still argued over.
On these timelines: Chernobyl, Eastern Europe & the Balkans, Russia & the USSR, Master
More from Chernobyl
- Chernobyl disaster (1986)
- The safety test that destroyed Reactor 4 (1986)
- Pripyat is evacuated (1986)
- A Swedish alarm exposes the secret (1986)
- The liquidators (1986)
- The sarcophagus seals Reactor 4 (1986)
- Gorbachev breaks the silence (1986)
- The Chernobyl exclusion zone (1986)
Around 1986
- Iranian Revolution (1978)
- Dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)
- Yugoslav Wars (1991)
- Gulf War (1990)
- (Everything I Do) I Do It for You (Bryan Adams) (1991)
- Night Fever (Bee Gees) (1978)
- Invention of the World Wide Web (1989)
- Another Brick in the Wall (Part II) (Pink Floyd) (1979)
- That's The Way Love Goes (Janet Jackson) (1993)
- Pop music: the 1980s (1980)