april 26, 1986

i remember when chernobyl blew up, and the global panic that followed, and the stories of the fire-fighters and helicopter pilots who died puking and bleeding, their skin blistering, within hours of trying to fight the radioactive fire that burned there.

a couple of years later someone (maybe the discovery channel back when they didn't suck) made a documentary, where they sent a robot with a camera into the sarcophagus, and all the way into the blown-out reactor chamber.

i was incredibly freaked out by that, knowing that the radiation levels there were so high that anything living would be killed, very painfully, in minutes if they were there, but there i was, watching it.

there's a photo essay here about the effects on the people who live/d there. (some of the pictures are pretty hard to take).