[CCIP]

It's actually affected me personally - I lived in Russia at the time, and was 2 years old, and happened to be caught in a rainshower in the days after it... There is reason to suspect that some chronic health problems I experienced in the years afterwards were related to it.

The degree of disinformation following the disaster is staggering. Noone knew anything, because the information was repressed until too late.

It was even tougher on family friends of hours though. They lived in Kiev; 4 days later, most of them were at the May Day parade - and even then nobody was told anything, but everybody's ears were ringing. They could tell something was wrong, but nobody stopped the event, and so most of them were there. Most of them except one of the siblings in that family, that is, because he was busy with his work as one of the "liquidators". It's hard to overstate how tragic the fate of the "liquidators" of Chernobyl is - not only are they the unsung heroes who never got their true credit, but they're also the most significant group of victims who hardly got any support until too late. Most of them had no idea how bad it was, and in fact most of them didn't even know what they were being sent into. Those who were sent in the immediately afterwards generally had neither training nor protective equipment to deal with it. The best safety measure that most of them got was to limit their exposure - but working near a melted-down reactor meant that even a few minutes was enough to kill many of them, or at least change their life forever. That brother of my family's friends never recovered from it. He was sick for the rest of his life and never even got so much as a thanks. 10 years after Chernobyl, he blew his own head off with a shotgun in front of his entire family.

Hopefully someday the "liquidators" will get their rightful place in that story. Sadly, fewer and fewer of them are alive these days.