These three people were heroes when the world was on the verge of catastrophic collapse. You could say it's almost 'doomsday', at least in parts of Europe. They bravely took action to prevent the Chernobyl tragedy from getting worse.
On April 26, 1986, at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the Ukrainian city of Pripyat, a late-night safety test went wrong. Dozens of people died soon after and thousands more in the years that followed. The disaster released 400 times more radiation into the atmosphere than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and polluted millions of hectares of land around it.
It could have been much worse, but if it weren't for the bravery of three volunteers - mechanical engineer Alexei Ananenko, senior engineer Valeri Bespalov and shift supervisor Boris Baranov - who stepped forward to carry out what many consider a 'suicide mission'.
According to History UK, on the day of the disaster and in an effort to control the blaze, firefighters pumped water into the nuclear reactor. One of the side effects is flooding the basement with radioactive water. This basement contains a valve which when turned will drain a 'bubble pool' which is below the reactor and which acts as a coolant for the generator.
If the three brave men did not succeed in their mission, Chernobyl's death toll would likely run into the millions. Nuclear physicist Vassili Nesterenko stated that the explosion would have a magnitude of 3-5 megatons that would render most of Europe uninhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years.
Dressed in wetsuits and equipped only with flashlights, three volunteers jumped into the darkness of the dungeon below and went in search of the vital valve.
Andrew Leatherbarrow, author of the 2016 book Chernobyl 01:23:40, spent five years researching the disaster. In his writings, the basement was flooded with radioactive water but firefighters had previously pumped some of it out, so by the time people jumped into the water, it was only knee-deep.
They were also not the first to enter as the others had already gone into the basement to measure radiation levels, although little or nothing is known about the fate of these people. But still, the invention of the valve was a miracle, as Leatherbarrow put it.
"People enter basements in wetsuits, radioactive water up to their knees, in corridors filled with a myriad of pipes and valves, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack," he said.
Ananenko told Soviet media that everyone in the Chernobyl NPS witnessed the operation. When their mission was successful, everyone cheered with joy.
"We heard water gurgling from the tank. And within minutes we were being hugged by people," he said.
