I was twelve when it happened, and I still remember everybody being confused and the newspapers and the radio and TV and our teachers all saying different things. I remember my old man saying that if there was plutonium found outside the plant, there must have been a meltdown, and the core breached, no matter what the media said. Days later we heard on the news, that he was right, that in fact an entire reactor block had exploded. Our physics teachers got into an argument at school, I remember that, too. One was saying there was danger, and one was saying, there wasn't. He seemed to think radiation stopped at the Czech border where our friends the Americans would shoot it down
Living in the Cold War was indeed interesting, as you say, horrorgirl.
My husband remembers seeing people on TV in full chemsuits clearing off the top level of sand in a playground. Where I grew up, the people in my neighbourhood took a perverse pride in defying any and all safety precautions. They all said, since the strawberries looked, felt and tasted the same, there could be noithing wrong and it was all lies and propaganda, as my old man put it. He knew about plutonium, but he thought fallout would look like black and red rain - like in the movies, you know. The town magistrate was asking people not to eat vegetables from their garden and had officials at the market with geiger counters confiscating the worst contaminated stuff - and where I lived, eating your home grown stuff was a 'no way will someone tell me what to eat' thing. Those families that did take precautions were ridiculed as cowards. We had learned basic precautions at school - such as washing your hair and shoes, and I almost got a beating when I insisted on washing our dog, too. They could not keep me from washing my hair, though. I was glad when the worst was over and people no longer took it as a personal insult if you didn't want to eat their milk, mushrooms, vegetables, etc.
But what I remember most is my determination not to be dependent on someone else to interpret the data for me. Chernobyl sparked my interest in science - I wanted to
know what was going on. I also had my first taste of the selfrighteousness of human stupidity.
