Vasily Ignatenko was a Ukrainian fire-fighter, one of the heroes of Chernobyl. The Soviet nuclear reactor exploded on April 26th, 1986, causing the biggest nuclear disaster in history. Ignatenko was one of the first responders on the scene but, like his fellow firefighters, was woefully ill-equipped for such a catastrophe. The Soviet authorities had made inadequate plans for a possible meltdown at Chernobyl, and so when emergency crews arrived to deal with the rapidly deteriorating situation, they were forced to improvise as best they could.
Ignatenko, on his own initiative, climbed up to the roof of the reactor's main building in an attempt to put out the open-air graphite fires that were raging there. It was these fires that gave Ignatenko the massive dose of radiation that would eventually cause his death.
Thanks to the heroic efforts of Ignatenko and his comrades, all but one of the fires at Chernobyl would be extinguished by the following morning. But by then the damage had already been done. A giant cloud of radiation had been unleashed on Western Europe by the reactor's meltdown which would, in due course, lead to countless deaths and birth-defects, not to mention long-term environmental damage.
Vasily Ignatenko, along with 27 of his fellow firefighters, would later perish from radiation sickness. The men's bodies were so radioactive that they had to be buried beneath mounds of zinc and concrete in order to protect the public.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/vasily-ignatenko
Sunday, May 21, 2017
What was Vasily Ignatenko's job? Where did he work?
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