26 April 1986
01.25
01.30
01.45
02.10
03.00
06.40
11.00
20.00
Accident occurred
Site Medical Centre informed (3 medical staff on duty)
2 specialised teams of medical staff set out from Pripyat. Later additional teams sent out
115 beds made available in regional hospitals
First 29 victims admitted to hospitals
Distribution started of potassium iodate tablets to all workers on power plant site and to patients. (He compared this with Three Mile Island where tablets were not distributed for 6 hours)
Special teams of physicists, dermatologists, radiologists and clinicians alerted in Moscow who
Flew to Kiev in a specially chartered plane
Iodate tablets distributed in Pripyat by medical staff and local door to door volunteers.
Professor Ilyin said that in retrospect the scale of response to the accident and its organisation was astonishing. Hundreds of institutes in the Soviet Union supplied specialists and millions of dosimetric measurements were taken. Up to the 10 May several hundred thousand people were medically examined -including blood tests. Some 200 to 300 people were diagnosed with acute radiation sickness. These cases were confined to workers and there were none in the general population.
Thirty-eight million people live the Dnieper valley and there was much concern over the elution by rainfall of radioactivity deposited on the Chernobyl site. They were lucky in that between 26 April and the end of May very little rainfall fell in the area. Professor Ilyin attributed this to the intensive weather modification activity of the State Hydro-meteorological Committee who dispersed chemical substances to dissipate the clouds.
He said that for many years starting from the 1960s the Soviet Union, on the basis of much research work and international experience, developed a conceptual basis for the protection of the population and the inhabited environment in the event of an accident or emergency radioactive release.
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