POLISH MEMORIES OF CHERNOBYL...April 26th 1986

Today is the anniversary of the worlds worst nuclear accident , the explosion in the reactor at Chernobyl nuclear power station....

It was this accident that first brought me to Poland in 1997 , on route to Belarus to take aid to the children dying from this disaster , what i saw there will live in my memory forever , no words can ever describe the sadness of a generation so devastated...

Later i went into the dead zone , the area deemed to dangerous for people ever to live there , to see whole towns , villages completly deserted , homes that can never be returned to....

When i first moved to Poland i met a girl called Aneta , a teacher , who was only a child when Chernobyl made its mark on the world , she remembers being taken from school to some clinic where she was made to drink some kind of medicine...

None of the Polish children understood what was going on , and many parents were afraid , but not exactly sure what of.....

What are your memories of that day in 1986 when nuclear power showed what it can do if you are not carefull with it..?????????

ask the ex commie authorities. the rest of polish citizens were informed a few days after.

I was in Ternopil' oblast' in Ukraine helping my father to plant potatoes in my grandpa's field. I was 7 then. It was a hot day, clear sky, not a single cloud. We found out about the tragedy at the plant only from the radio when Sweden noticed some radioactive material in their air. May 1 was a parade in all the cities of Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, 5 days after the explosion!!!! and 70 kms from the place!!!!!!(if we are talking about the biggest parade in the capital Kijiv) and people were completely unaware of that with their kids. It was horrible. Communism is the worst thing that could have happened to this world. Deputies and high shots of the government sent their kids abroad while people like us were dying not knowing from what. Many firefighters died as well - ones immediately, others after a while - extinguishing the radioactive fire. These people are true heroes and they saved lives of millions. Imagine also - they had a big radio-waves dumper in Lviv to kill the waves coming from Western Europe to keep all unaware. How ....is it?

Because I was just a little kid then I only remember my parents talking about it much much later, about that commie gov informed about the whole situation only after western media started talking about it, so many people reacted with a big delay, it was a sunny hot day in Poland and many people were walking freely, my mum took me for my first day in kindergarten, she said later when I was older, she would never do that if she knew. There was also a huge commotion about taking iodine these days.

I rode my Harley to Ternopil last year to visit a friend there , a nice town...

sounds like my memories. i went back home and wanted to play in the backyard but grandpa told me to go home. i was pissed off but when he said about nuclear disaster it sounded cool enough to go home and listen to radio with him.

What would have eventually happened if Russia did not contain this site in concrete? Does anybody really know? I heard something about the China Syndrome.

What does that actually mean.

It means the molten radioactive mess melts its way into the ground...and keeps going...it contaminates the ground water , and causes an even bigger disaster....I think its called the China syndrome because somebody said it could in theory melt its way to China...

Scary But if the earths core is melted lava, I have my doubts if anybody really knows. I just hope that we never find out. France seems to be doing a good job with their atomic plants.

Awhile back we had a scare here in the US in PA. a place called three mile island. They eventually contained it, but it scared the hell out of a lot of people

It was only by good luck that this did not become a Chernobyl....Came pretty close...!

Płyn Lugola (literally "Lugol's liquid", or more precisely Lugol's solution, Lugol's iodine), in Poland we drank it on May 1st during/after the obligatory Labour's Day parade.

It was like Nathan said, the official news was held secret for a long time (days), until the rumour was wide-spread throughout the country and it was impossible to hide the truth anymore.

Interesting views of professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, a member of some radiation laboratory at that time who suggested using this liquid to prevent toxic assimilation of iodine.

He claims it wasn't necessary (in Polish), but at that time they didn't know the full picture (because the Russians didn't inform about the size of the catastrophe and Polish scientists just assumed the worst case scenario).

And an article from Wprost (in English), where they say that according to UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation) report the meltdown at Chernobyl wasn't a big deal.

I don't know, I guess it's hard believe it, when you read what people, who visited those lands, are saying. We all know the UN is a corrupted organization :(

Edit: Rzeczpospolita article (in Polish) from 2008, some interesting points:


Edit time of 15 minutes is too short :)

Other fragments of this last article:



And I remember a song, heard at some concert, probably in 1986 or 1987, with the text "Płyn Lugola to nie Coca-Cola"

Chernobyl was an accident ready to happen. It had no containment building like the US based plants. Does any one remember if the scientists in charge if the "experiment" were Ukrainian or Russian?

They run tours over there now- Is there a group in Poland that organizes a trip to go to Chernobyl? I've been trying to do this for some time now but I always get side tracked.

tourkiev.com/chernobyl.php

If there isn,t perhaps i could organise one....? I have friends over there that could act as guides and whatever.... Have a look at the website created by Elena filatova , she has some amazing pictures and stories about Chernobyl.... elenafilatova.com

Thread attached on merging:
Poland and Chernobyl

Good day,

I'm currently reading Life Exposed-Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. It's a disturbing, heart breaking read about the social/political/health after effects of Chernobyl. Poland is mentioned with respect to the radioactive plume hovering over the area initially after the "event" and possible "after effects".

To those of you living in Poland, how do you feel about the "event?" Are you concerned?

With respect,
Karinka

No (if you mean Poland). It is said that Poland wasn't afected so much by the effects of catastrophe. The radioactive cloud on polish teritory was only the frist day after the catastrophe, then it moved north and was floating around whole Europe missing Poland.

I know that Belarus was severely damaged by the disaster. They have high % of children bore with deformed bodies and rare diseases. Also there is high % of cancers. Its because on territories which are polluted of fallout ppl live (the zone on the Belarusian side is too little and it doesnt encircle all the polluted area). Ppl eant fruits and vagetables from polluted soil.

All Ukrainians born post Chernobyl are horribly mutated.

I was born 13 days after Chernobyl disaster and im all fine, not mutated at all lol. That disaster didnt really have much of an impact on polish people health. Well, it caused some panic but not much above that.

It means we are in the same age jablko ;)
My mom was still preganant with me when it happened.


it was Lugol's iodine. Every child and preganant woman had to drink it to prevent absorbtion of radioactive iodine which can cause thyroid cancer.


well actually story wasn't like that. That's the soviet union authorities who didn't informed Poland and any other country that there was nuclear plant disaster. Nevertheless in 2 days (28th of April) afer the night of disaster the polish facilities which were controling levels of radiation (in Mikołajki), detected abnormal size of it which gave the sugestion that somewhere in the east there had to be a nuclear disaster. In the evening the same day bbc informed whole world that there was a nuclear plant disaster. At night 28/29 April polish commitee decided to gave whole population of eastern Poland Lugol's iodine. In 24 hours they distributed it to 75% of childrens population. The next day they decided to gave it out to whole Poland's children population. To sum up in 2 days (!) they distributed a medicine to 18,5 mln ppl!!!

It was the first case when authorities of People's Republic of Poland made up decissions against recommendations of Soviet Union to protect their citizens.

Can't remember families now, but suspect that there was both. And I would not name them "scientists", more likely engineers of various disciplines, that was need to run a test to improve security procedures during planned reactor shutdown.

One of worst things was that the person who lead this test was electrician, not very familiar with nuclear physics. And another bad thing that lead to this disaster is interruption of experiment (dispatcher of energetic system disabled further lowering of power due to accident on other electric plant so they was forced to keep just lowered partial power level for a while to prevent blackouts during peak hours). In fact, when they was given green light to continue, reactor was in state that was not planned by ones who checked and sanctioned experiment plan.

Domino effect due to multiple small mistakes - from design flaw in regulating rods construction to intervention of persons that follows their own instructions (like dispatcher that was in charge for keeping whole grid working) but not understand consequences of their perfectly legal commands. Step by step, they put reactor to state that was never planned by designers, when emergency shutdown button on a control panel acted as a self-destruction button.


I'm not communism fan, but I can easily remember at least ten things that can happen to the world and that is much worse than communism. ;)

I spent some time with families in Belarus affected by this disaster....My friend Natasha has one son who died soon after the disaster , he was a helicopter pilot who flew close over the reactor to dump sand on it...Another younger son is dying from cancer....

Natasha runs a charity to help families affected by the accident , and it was bringing a convoy of aid that first brought me to eastern Europe , and began my love affair with Poland....

I have been into the dead zone , the area deemed unfit for humans to live there , and i went to Chernobyl itself , this was in the days when it was forbidden to go there , now i believe you can go on organised tours of the place... Its a deeply haunting place , and very sad....for some reason i keep being drawn back to the place....

Pripyat swimming pool:
1996



2003

You could fill that pool and its good as new :) (almost)

well I've seen worse swimming pools in Lodz and open for swimming...


just watch out the ceiling colapsing on your head...

LOL...

"The China Syndrome" is a name of movie (depicting an accident at a nuclear reactor) that was released just days before Three Mile Island reactor accident in United States.

One would be enough for me.
I'm all ear.

Actually recent polls show that 200% of Ukrainians have low IQ due to Chernobyl incident and being mixed with gypsies and negros.

200% ..wow , thats quite a lot of them then...??

I know quite a bit about the effects of radiation on humans , but i never heard of it affecting your IQ....????

I am also not quite sure the Gypsy blood makes them stupid...My Russian girlfriend is half gypsy , and is one of the most highly qualified teachers of Russian language and culture in Moscow....

yeah, but Russian gypsies those who survived due to have high IQ, culling .....

They must have counted by mistake you with Ironside when you two were visiting Ukraine and it dramatically lowered the whole nation's IQ together with neighboring Poland (hence 200%). Please, stay at home, don't open the door when they gather the information or again we will have a huge negative deviation in the IQ statistics.

Radiation does not affect your IQ...and in any case 80% of the radiation fell on Belarus not Ukraine...

During my stay in Kiev i am sad to say the only idiots i met were a bunch of English people...!