Remember watching the evening news with my dad when they finally announced it publicly. They completely downplayed it. In came in as "Oh by the way, an accident at ChAES happened, next up - sports...".
My dad, a mechanical engineer, also specializing in workplace safety was really concerned and told me. "This is bad. They are probably downplaying the accident who knows who horrible it really is...".
The fact that people knew government lied routinely in cases like that, nobody believed them so all kinds of rumors started to circulate.
My mom kept some flowers on the balcony. She claimed they died that year because of the radiation. I don't really believe that was the cause, but it just explains the anxiety and worry people experienced.
Then there was a call to go help clean up. They promised money, even better apartments for volunteers (housing was government provided). Some went and they came back to a new apartment but they didn't enjoy it for too long. Others told stories of people burned so badly by the radiation their skin and meat was falling off their bones.
Another really sad thing happened when evacuees started streaming to different cities. They were shunned and treated horribly by others. It was paranoia, prejudices and mistrust. Mixed with lots of irrational fear ("Maybe they are still radioactive, I wouldn't get near them". I can remember my uncle saying...). How horrible. Those poor people had to leave everything behind only to be faced by that kind of attitude.
> Then there was a call to go help clean up. They promised money, even better apartments for volunteers (housing was government provided). Some went and they came back to a new apartment but they didn't enjoy it for too long. Others told stories of people burned so badly by the radiation their skin and meat was falling off their bones.
Just as a complementary data point, there were people who turned out OK. My friend's father was on his honeymoon in the area and when the call for volunteers came, he signed up. From looking at the family album, my friend tells me he lost something like 20kg in 3 weeks, but otherwise, it turned out well - he's alive and healthy today, and so is my friend.
Ummm, that's ~2 lbs per day. Was he running a marathon each day without eating, for 3 weeks straight? That alone should have shut down his heart. Your friend's father is much stronger than an ox, as I am sure most farm animals could not have survived that either.
I think OP's point was that a 20 second blurb, no matter how truthful or accurate, is downplaying the situation.
If an analogous event happened in the US, all entertainment programming would be suspended and there would be continuous news coverage on all the major channels for several days, just like after 9/11.
"One of the reactors is damaged" was a huge understatement that ignored, by omission, the real issue, which was, of course, the massive release of radioactive material.
Here I found the 20 seconds blurb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ouJjaV_NbY (sorry in Russian, obviously).
My dad, a mechanical engineer, also specializing in workplace safety was really concerned and told me. "This is bad. They are probably downplaying the accident who knows who horrible it really is...".
The fact that people knew government lied routinely in cases like that, nobody believed them so all kinds of rumors started to circulate.
My mom kept some flowers on the balcony. She claimed they died that year because of the radiation. I don't really believe that was the cause, but it just explains the anxiety and worry people experienced.
Then there was a call to go help clean up. They promised money, even better apartments for volunteers (housing was government provided). Some went and they came back to a new apartment but they didn't enjoy it for too long. Others told stories of people burned so badly by the radiation their skin and meat was falling off their bones.
Another really sad thing happened when evacuees started streaming to different cities. They were shunned and treated horribly by others. It was paranoia, prejudices and mistrust. Mixed with lots of irrational fear ("Maybe they are still radioactive, I wouldn't get near them". I can remember my uncle saying...). How horrible. Those poor people had to leave everything behind only to be faced by that kind of attitude.