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Tuesday, April 24, 1990 / University Daily Kansan
Chernobyl horror still festering
Soviets cry for remembrance as fourth anniversary nears
The Associated Press
NOVIYE GROMYKI, U.S.S.R. - Smiling children skip along dirt paths, kicking up radioactive dust. They throw stones in their radioactive playground, then go home for contaminated meat and milk.
Since cesium, strontium and plutonium descended on their rooftops, gardens, farms and schools four years ago, the people of this Byelrussian village and of scores more in the Ukraine and Russia have been prisoners of Chernobyl.
Bartolomeyeva, another village, a warm and hearty woman named Tatiana T. Kharshunova said, "They did this to us, and we had to live here. Not just for a month on two nights. No one paid attention to us."
They are surrounded and continuously bombarded by an enemy they cannot see, smell or bear. They say that if you are caught in the world have all but forbidden them.
She and her neighbors grow potatoes and barley in their gardens, even though the radiation level is 40 curries, nearly three times the danger level. They can recite the figures like they do not seem fully aware of the threat.
"I'm as strong as a horse," Irina Y. Kovelova. She looked down at her 14-month-old grandson in her arms and added, "He's strong."
The boy and his parents were scheduled to be evacuated the next day.
"I'll cry when they leave," the grandmother said. "The cemetery is nearby, so I die and go there."
'Doesn't glow or whistle'
Nadezhda N. Dmitrochenko, of the local governing council, said she tries to explain the dangers of radiation, but "people still don't know what this is . . . It doesn't glow and it doesn't whistle."
On April 26, 1986, an explosion and fire destroyed one of four reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine, 125 miles southwest of
Novive Gromyki
As the children of the village played on a sunny April day four years later, chickens and cats darted among the wooden huts.
The only sounds were chickens chucking, dogs barking and the distant four of tractors plowing containment ditches. The vast, fertile plum traversed by a creek
Knight-Ridder Tribune News
The official death toll from Chernobyl remains 31, but a Soviet newspaper said last fall it had risen to 250. Scientists still predict that thousands of deaths will be traceable to the accident.
After years of passivity, the people affected are speaking out.
About 70 percent of the Chernbolny radiation fell on Byelorussia and contaminated one-fifth of the land, an effect that has led to its deserts, where 2.2 million people live.
Residents of Gomel, the provincial capital, plan a strike and demonstration tomorrow, the anniversary, to protest official handling of what the government newspaper Ivestia called the greatest technological catastrophe in world history.
Protests planned
Immediately after the accident, about 25,000 Byelorussians were evacuated, but only last year did officials admit the full scope of the contamination and decontamination to more people. The resettlement will take five years, and people eat and breathe nuclear poison in the meantime.
Citizens of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital 80 miles south of Chernobyl, also plan demonstrators. A telethon sponsored for victims is scheduled in Moscow.
The program appears poorly run. Some evacuees are being resettled on land that also is contaminated, and
Protesters demand that officials who concealed the extent of the danger and delayed evacuating contaminated areas be brought to trial. They want medical care for victims and supplies of radiation-free food
the government is building new homes, schools and offices in areas that are being evacuated.
Most families with young children have been moved out of Noviye Gromyki since resettlement began Jan. 1.
Those still waiting feel abandoned and frightened. They cannot move on their own because housing must be found for them.
"We sit and cry," said Claudia A.
'We sit and cry'
"I lived almost a whole century here, raised a son and daughter here." Two weeks ago they closed our store, so we're eating cabbage and cucumbers now. "But we don't know whether it's dangerous or not, but we have to eat."
A farmer said the milk from his cows was too radioactive to drink, so he sells it to the government, which says that the milk had the butter was supposed to be safe.
Many people interviewed said they drank the milk because there was no alternative. Many others said they did not bother to have their home produce checked at a local radiation laboratory.
Soil and dust carry radioactive particles.
The only paved surfaces in Noviye Gromyki are one street and the grade school playground at No. 13 Lenin Street. Winds blow dust from the dirt roads and fields onto the asphalt, onto the people and into their homes.
Residents are warned not to gather firewood from the highly radioactive forests nearby. Burning it makes their stoves into what specialists have called "mini-reactors."
Villagers are supposed to wash frequently, but they are allowed only one bar of soap a month, the same as anyone else. Soap is rationed in most of the country.
Ignored warnings
each household gets 30 rubles a month from the government to buy uncontaminated food, but it is hard to find. Thirty rubles are worth $49 at the official exchange rate but are much less in reality.
In Vetka, a few miles south of Novoyi Gromyki, children are fed "clean" meals at High School No. 1, and the crumbling cement floors are washed several times a day.
Outside, their protection against radiation consists of a paved playground and a 6-inch-high concrete barrier to keep them off the sidewalk where contaminated dirt falls from the roof. Students are supposed to rinse their shoes in a pan of water at the school entrance, but many don't.
Several students said they ignored warnings and rode mopeds in the forest. They complained of headaches and exhaustion, which they blamed on fallout.
To the list of aliments the Chernobyl generation suffers, school principal Nikolai N. Shatilo added bloody noses, swollen thyroid glands and vision loss. The radiation level at High School No. 1 is two to three times higher than normal.
"We can't provide normal conditions in school," he said. "There's only one thing to do: take them to a clean zone. We must save the children. They are our future."
One student said she was bitter because no one seemed to care, not even the doctors who examine her class twice a year.
A 16-year-old boy said, "We're sick and tired of all the checks. What are they for? All they do is keep saying everything's gormal."
Kent State finally to build memorial for slain students
The Associated Press
KENT, Ohio — On a campus whose name sometimes seems to stand only for the senseless deaths of four students 20 years ago, Kent State University finally is dedicating a memorial.
Many of Kent State's 24,000 students weren't even born when nervous National Guardmen whirled on a crowd of protesters hurling rocks and yelling obscenities May 4, 1970. But most have had front-row seats for a still-coronary debate on how to memorize the dead, the wounded and the student activism of a past era.
"It's much too late, a meaningless memorial, 20 years later," she said. "Anything so brusquely given is rather meaningless when you have to hit somebody continually over the head to do it."
Doris Krause of Monroeville, Pa., whose daughter, Allison, was among the dead, said she would not attend the dedication this May
But Florence and Louis Schroeder of Lorain, Ohio, parents of another slain student, William Schroeder, attend, and will speak.
"It's not as big a memorial as some people would like, but it suits us just fine," she said.
"We did not ask for a memorial. We were perfectly content with the little plaque." Florence said, referring to the plaque set in a grassy island of a parking lot near the site of the shootings.
Student leaders and a group headed by Alan Canfora, who was wounded in the wrist from the 1970 shooting, pressed for construction of a larger, $1.1 million memorial that would have included 13 columns, one for each student shot.
Rarely a week goes by without the Daily Kent Stater, the campus newspaper, carrying a letter about some facet of the dedication, widely called "the anniversary."
The university endorsed the idea but said potential contributors just didn't respond to its three-year fund-raising effort.
University President Michael Schwartz said the $150,000 eventually collected still allowed an impressive structure. On April 11, the university also announced creation of four scholarships as a "living memorial" to the slain students.
"This is not a scaled-down memorial." Schwartz said. "It's a very large, impressive piece and will help you track our tracks when you walk up to it."
The memorial plaza is made of carnelian-hued Cold Spring granite from Minnesota on a 2½-acre site at aop hill. Moving away from the plaza are four standing slabs of amber and red granite, 8 feet long by 8 by 23 feet, signifying that the impact of May 4, 1970, spread far beyond Kent State.
the memorial was designed by Yugoslavian-born architect Bruno Ast of Chicago.
Three words are engraved on the spot where visitors will step onto the plaza: "Inquire. Learn. Reflect."
student senator Carl DeVaughn said students were less interested in the size or cost of the memorial than in a wholehearted commitment from the university. He said students would have been satisfied with something as simple as a food drive in memory of the victims if the administration had backed the idea enthusiastically.
But even students who urged the administration to build a larger memorial admit interest among students is limited.
A survey last fall showed that 69 percent of the students polled thought all students should be involved in the 20th anniversary commemoration. But 78 percent said they either didn't have the time to participate or weren't interested.
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