UKRAINE: It took days for most of the world to find out about the worst nuclear accident in history. Maria Dika knew in a split second, writes Dan McLaughlin,in Chernobyl
She was a guard in block four of the Chernobyl power station in the early hours of April 26th, 1986, when its reactor exploded and showered lethal fallout across the Soviet Union and northern Europe.
"There was a flash of fire and the sound of a blast, and a wall collapsed. We were aware of the danger but weren't allowed to leave. Then I began to feel sick about seven in the morning and was evacuated to Moscow." Dika was flown to a clinic for the treatment of radiation sickness.
Over the next few days, trains and vast convoys of buses evacuated 118,000 others from the town of Pripyat, where most of Chernobyl's workers lived, and a 30 kilometre wide area around the power plant in northern Ukraine.
More than 100 settlements near Chernobyl were silent by the time the world began to comprehend the scale of a disaster that released 10 times more radiation than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Officials told locals to leave most of their belongings, because they would be back in a few weeks. Subsequent radiation checks showed the area would be uninhabitable for years. But just three months after the accident, Dika was back in the "dead zone".
Hundreds of others have joined her in returning to the town of Chernobyl, a few kilometres from the plant, where a crude steel and concrete sarcophagus was hastily thrown around the mangled reactor to contain leaking radiation.
"I was born around here and spent my life here. These are my simple reasons for returning," says Dika (42). Radiation counters still spiral alarmingly in the dead zone, but she says locals have got used to the threat of contamination. "Or perhaps the radiation has got used to us," she smiles.
Tatyana Krushch, who collects empty bottles and cans to supplement her meagre pension, came back to Chernobyl after spending 18 months away. She says she fears nothing from the fallout that showered the area. "The air is clean and the forest and streams are lovely," she says. "What is there to be scared of?"
There is less bravado in the village of Laski, where the future is still clouded by Chernobyl, four years after its last reactor was shut down.
"Lots of people are dying here from cancer and strokes, and I was so worried while I was pregnant," says Alla Stepanchuk, who was born in this village 60 kilometres from the power plant. "I thought I would give birth to a freak." Her 2½-year-old son is fine but she has gathered with dozens of other Laski residents to have him examined at a Red Cross mobile clinic that offers screening for thyroid cancer.
Doctors expect a sharp increase in the disease over the next five years among people who were under 18 in 1986. Thyroid cancer is very rare in children but the Red Cross found 20-30 cases a year among young people in this region in the 1990s, and 68 cases last year, says Dr Vladimir Sert, who runs the clinic.
He blames Soviet secrecy and incomprehension of the scale of the disaster for hampering the response to the accident. The full implications of the delay are only now being recognised.
"Had people been ready they could have done something," he says. "There were official stocks of potassium iodide that stops radiation entering the thyroid. But they didn't give it out until it was too late to be of any use."
Estimates vary over how many people were affected by Chernobyl but Ukraine says 4,400 of its citizens have died and more than two million received hospital treatment for illnesses related to the disaster. It is believed to have physically or psychologically harmed some seven million people in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus.
"People here were shocked at the time of the accident, of course, but few will have realised that it would still be killing people 18 years on," says Dubliner Joe Lowry, who is sponsored by the Irish Red Cross to run the organisation's office in Ukraine.
No one knows for how long and how severely the Chernobyl accident will affect the people who live here. But work to neutralise the danger of the shattered nuclear plant will take more than a century.
There are more than 100 square metres of cracks in the sarcophagus that was built with maximum speed after the blast, using remote-controlled machines to spare humans prolonged exposure to massive radiation. Inside the grey hulk, 200 tonnes of wreckage has fused with nuclear fuel. Water is seeping in and dust is in danger of billowing out. The building is unstable, and sits in an area at risk from earthquakes.
"The shelter was and is radioactively hazardous," says Yulia Marusich, of Chernobyl's information centre. "There is a real possibility of collapse."
Work will begin this year to stabilise the building and then, after 2006, a massive metal dome will be constructed alongside the sarcophagus, and ultimately slid over the top of it on rails. The 108-metre high, 250-metre wide structure will allow experts to dismantle the plant without releasing tonnes of poisonous dust into the open air. The internationally funded programme will cost some $768 million.
Life goes on in and around Chernobyl. About 4000 people work at the plant, monitoring the sarcophagus and removing fuel from the other reactors on site. They come and go on a train from a town specially built for them 60 kilometres away. And some people continue to creep back into this poisoned zone, even while others, mostly the young, do everything they can to escape.
At the mobile clinic at Laski, doctors discovered that Olga Davidenko (17) had a thyroid problem. She must go to a hospital miles away to undergo tests for cancer.
"I want to go away to university and never return," she says in her dusty village's main street.
"I'm convinced that people should get away from here."