Chernóbil, a 20 años

Hoy se cumplen 20 años de la explosión en Chernóbil. Les dejo el link a un video que se hizo con un ensayo fotográfico de Paul Fusco llamado “Chernobyl Legacy”.

Transcribo el texto, narrado por él mismo:

Some guy made a mistake. Pushed the wrong button at the wrong time. And within 20-seconds they couldn’t stop it.

Thousands and thousands of tons of radioactive material were blasted into the air, caught up in a huge storm system and started moving out across the country.

Seventy percent of that radioactive material fell in the country of Belarus. It wasn’t their reactor.

The first people to react were two companies of firefighters.

Fusco quoting survivor Ivan Shavre: I woke up in a hospital in Moscow. At first we joked about the radiation. Then we heard that a comrade began to bleed from his nose and mouth. And his body turned black. And he died.

Wherever there is radiation, people live with it. They eat it in their food. They drink it in their water.

The kids at Novinki who are troubled, diagnosed, they are categorized… A, B, C, D.

Well D, hopeless, they are never going be real human beings. They will never obtain much. They all go to Novinki.

And, once they get there, if they survive and live they will be sent to the main asylum.

It was like a different race was being farmed because they look human but they were all troubled in very obvious ways.

Alesya was a young girl when she was first diagnosed with cancer. She had become exposed to radiation when she was a kid, like about 2-years old, when she ran out to play.

And, on that day, it was raining black and it was oily and it was referred to as the black rain of Chernobyl. And nine years later she comes down with Leukemia.

I met her in the hospital when was about sixteen. This sixteen year old, really beautiful teenager. I got back the next day and Alesya was in a coma. And her parents were obviously devastated. It was a horrific day of watching this mother lose her child.

Before I started to take photographs I asked her if it were ok. And her response to that was, “Yes, we want everyone to know what they’ve done.”

The horror of it, we just can’t even dare to think it’s ok that this might happen again.

Everyone says it will never happen. Well yeah, we always say that, it will never happen, but everything we make as human beings breaks.

Everything breaks. Everything wears out.

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