On the morning of April 26, 1986, a terrible explosion happened at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine. Two workers died right away, and 28 more people died in the weeks that followed from radiation sickness. The blast sent out dangerous radiation that was 400 times stronger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It became the worst nuclear accident the world has ever seen.
Firefighters rushed to the scene and put out the fires in about six hours. But while they were fighting the flames, they created another serious problem. The water they used to fight the fire filled up the basement under the broken reactor. Under the damaged reactor, there were huge pools holding about 5 million gallons of water that normally helped cool the plant. Scientists worried that the hot melting core would burn through the concrete floor and hit the water, which would cause another huge steam explosion.
As per The Daily Campus, experts said if the melting core touched the water pools, the explosion would be massive. It could destroy the other three reactors at the plant and spread deadly radiation across thousands of miles. Some people thought the blast could make large parts of Europe too dangerous to live in. The only way to stop this was to drain the water from the flooded basement as fast as possible.
Three workers took on the deadly job
On May 6, 1986, two engineers named Alexei Ananenko and Valeri Bezpalov joined a shift supervisor named Boris Baranov for this risky job. These three men worked at the plant and knew exactly where everything was located. They put on wetsuits and walked into the dark hallways under the destroyed reactor that were now filled with dangerous water.
The three men walked through water that came up to their knees while carrying flashlights to see in the dark. Ananenko later talked to reporters and said, “Everyone at the Chernobyl NPS was watching this operation. When the searchlight beam fell on a pipe, we were joyous. The pipe led to the valves. We heard the rush of water out of the tank.” They found the valves they needed and opened them. The next day, all the water was gone from under the reactor. They had stopped the second explosion from happening.
The names of three engineers who left in diving suits for a hot Chernobyl nuclear reactor, and saved the whole of Europe Alexey Ananenko Valery Bespalov Boris Baranov. These three people saved millions of inhabitants of the planet.#Chernobyl pic.twitter.com/M3enoKuGm9
— عامر (@a3fxx) May 25, 2019
People told stories for many years that all three men died soon after from radiation. But this was not true. They did get sick from the radiation and had some health problems, but they all lived through it. Like the brave woman who escaped slavery only to return 19 times to rescue others, these men showed incredible bravery when facing terrible danger.
In an interview from 2021, Ananenko said he never thought the job would definitely kill him. “They couldn’t have sent anyone else,” he explained. “And of course, in that position, I could hardly have said no.” Baranov died in 2005 from a heart attack when he was 64 years old. Ananenko and Bezpalov both lived and kept working in the nuclear power industry.
https://x.com/fasc1nate/status/1982937925869330555 The devastating effects of radiation exposure continue to remind us how dangerous the disaster was for everyone involved. In 2018, the president of Ukraine gave all three men an award called the Order for Courage. Baranov got his award after he died. What they did stopped an even bigger disaster and saved millions of people living across Europe.
