Hospital N°134 was where first aid was provided to the firefighters who bravely intervened at Chernobyl the night reactor number 4 exploded. They faced a fire that couldn't be quenched with the available means. Two floors below where I captured this photo, lies the basement holding all the clothing worn by those firefighters that night. Discarded in 1986, these clothes remain in that basement, still today, now as radioactive as they were then. For perspective, a dosimeter like the Earth-P wouldn't provide an exact reading, registering radiation levels ranging from 700 to over 999 microsieverts per hour.
In 1986, when the nuclear reactor exploded, I was just 14 years old and my father forbade me from going outside, worried by the wind's movement of radioactive dust from Kiev to Europe and Italy. TV news and journals echoed the same concerns. With the sky an the air appearing normal to me, I had no real understanding of the crisis. Perhaps that's why, many years later, I chose to travel to the exclusion zone to witness firsthand the source of the problem.