20 hours ago
9
Oslyak had just finished a night shift at ChNPP on April 25, and had returned to Pripyat and their cosy apartment, with its wall rugs and soft lighting typical of functional Soviet style. He slipped into bed next to Nikitina and fell into a deep sleep.
At 1:23am, explosions rang out across the night sky.
The city stirred in the night, and some residents woke to the blasts and an unfamiliar light on the horizon, but Nikitina and her husband remained asleep.
In the plant, molten fuel burned through layers of concrete and steel towards water beneath the reactor, threatening an even greater explosion.
Firefighters and workers responded, unaware of the danger, climbing onto the roof and into the wreckage as radiation surged beyond levels that humans can handle.
Two Chornobyl plant workers died that night as a result of the initial explosion, and a further 28 personnel and emergency workers called to the site would die in the following weeks as a result of acute radiation poisoning.
But in Pripyat, as Nikitina woke on the morning of April 26, everything seemed normal. It was Saturday, and while many plant workers were off, shops were open, and, as was the norm in the Soviet Union, children went to school.
Neither she nor her husband was scheduled to work that day, but as they left the apartment for a stroll, they noticed multiple sealed vehicles loaded with heavy equipment moving through the city towards the ChNPP.
They thought back to their university classes, where they had been taught what would happen if a reactor were damaged. It had been presented as such an unlikely scenario that, at the time, she said it felt almost like an old wives' tale.
Yet, they agreed that these signs had all the hallmarks of a major incident, so the couple and their child hunkered down in their apartment and made sure all the windows were tightly closed as a precaution.
The morning of April 27, they woke to temporary evacuation orders blaring from loudspeakers mounted on trucks and police cars.
Residents were told to gather at collection points near their buildings as there had been an incident at the ChNPP, while municipal services began distributing iodine tablets to the inhabitants of Pripyat to protect their thyroids from radiation exposure.
The authorities did not tell them how severe the incident was, and they were advised to pack enough food and clothes for just three days.
Before they were about to leave their apartment for evacuation, her husband received a call from the local authorities: He was needed at the plant and was told to stay behind.
Nikitina recalls the moment she stood on the warm spring day, waiting with her son to board a bus.
She said, although the roughly 49,000 residents of the city were evacuated in an orderly manner, she has realised in hindsight the extreme dangers they were exposed to, standing in dresses, shorts and light clothing, unaware they were immersed in a radioactive plume filled with radionuclides and aerosols.
Nikitina and her son were first evacuated to Ivankiv, a town roughly 50km (30 miles) south of Pripyat and about 90km (56 miles) north of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.
After Soviet authorities admitted on April 28 that a disaster had occurred, news of its severity spread among the evacuees.
A panicked Nikitina began desperately washing her and her son's clothes in their temporary lodging provided by the authorities, trying to remove any contamination. As she laid them out to dry on a balcony, a dosimetrist visited her, only to discover that they contained dangerous levels of radiation and ordered them to be immediately removed and destroyed.
