He says he saw soldiers in gas masks outside, and men washing the street with a foamy solution. Some men he knew from his work at the nuclear plant told him they had been called in urgently because “something happened”, but they did not know what.
As he looked out from the friend’s high-rise apartment, he spotted smoke rising from reactor four.
It would later become clear that firefighters and power plant workers had spent the night risking lethal doses of radiation to tackle a huge toxic blaze.
“I felt a bit anxious,” he says. Drawing on his training, he took some fabric, wet it and put it across the apartment entrance as a precaution to catch radioactive dust, he adds.
He then rushed to the market. Unusually for a Saturday morning, it was deserted, so he picked five tulips for the bouquet.
Iryna, who was staying with her mother in the family’s apartment, says the phone kept ringing overnight. Her mother sounded “alarmed”, she says, by neighbours calling to say “something terrible” had happened. But there was little detail.
Information was strictly controlled in the Soviet Union. They turned on the radio, but there was no mention of any incident.
In the morning, her mother rang the authorities: “They told her not to panic, all planned events in the city should go ahead.”
Officially, everything carried on as usual. Children were sent to school.
