New tours, painful reminders in Lithuania after hit ‘Chernobyl’ show
The success of a US television series on the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster has made its filming locations in Lithuania an off-beat tourist attraction, but has also renewed the anger and helplessness felt by many of the Lithuanians forced to clean up the contamination.
The Soviet leadership sent an estimated 7,000 Lithuanians, all but 100 of them male, to Chernobyl in the months and years after the disaster. Many were forced against their will.
There they joined others from across the Soviet Union to work on the clean-up without sufficient protection or medication for their exposure to the high levels of radiation. Many now suffer from illnesses and health problems as a result.
Lithuania, then part of the Soviet Union, was 450 km. from Chernobyl, in the Ukraine, also then a Soviet republic.
Kestutis Kazlauskas, 61, was a 28-year-old conscript who spent 105 days in a camp 30 km. from Chernobyl, helping build a dam for filtering out radiation from a river.
“We felt as if we were going to war,” he said. “We went to die there, and were almost surprised to come back alive.”
The TV series and its critical acclaim are a painful reminder how the Soviet and later Lithuanian governments paid little attention to the workers, former rescuers say.
The workers were issued faulty radiation gauges to track exposure, Kazlauskas said. Many drank local moonshine to relieve stress, despite reports that it was produced with radioactive water. “My main health problems were, immediately, the thyroid gland, high blood pressure and teeth falling out,” he said.
He has set up an organization of former clean-up workers to lobby for more government support, such as early retirement.
The mini-series, nominated for 19 Emmy awards on July 16, depicts the explosion’s aftermath: the vast clean-up operation and the inquiry into the disaster, caused by a botched safety test in the Chernobyl atomic plant that sent clouds of nuclear material across much of Europe.
Groups of foreign visitors can now tour the filming locations such as the Ignalina Power Plant, decommissioned almost a decade ago, which has a Chernobyl-type reactor and control rooms.
Its core remains highly radioactive and stands 7 m. below tourists’ feet, shielded by protective layers.
“When we walked on the nuclear reactor and she [the guide] explained what we were actually standing on, I got a little bit of an uncomfortable feeling,” said 32-year-old British tourist Tom Slaytor, wearing a plant-issued white overall and boots and a blue safety helmet.
Everyone is checked for contamination on exit. (Reuters)