Chernobyl Chernobyl Chernobyl () is a city in the restricted Chernobyl Exclusion Zone situated in the Ivankiv Raion of northern Kiev Oblast, near Ukraine's border with Belarus. Chernobyl is about northeast of Kiev, and approximately southwest of the Belarusian city of Gomel and 16 km [10 mi] from Ukraine’s border with Belarus. The city was the administrative center of Chernobyl Raion (district) from 1923 until it was disestablished in 1988. Before its evacuation, the city had about 14,000 residents. The city was evacuated on 27 April 1986, 30 hours after the Chernobyl disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant which was
Chernobyl disaster corridor in the basement. So volunteers in wetsuits and respirators (for protection against radioactive aerosols) and equipped with dosimeters, entered the knee-deep radioactive water and managed to open the valves. These were the engineers Alexei Ananenko and Valeri Bezpalov (who knew where the valves were), accompanied by the shift supervisor Boris Baranov. Upon succeeding and emerging from the water, according to many English language news articles, books and the prominent BBC docudrama "Surviving Disaster – Chernobyl Nuclear", the three knew it was a suicide-mission and began suffering from radiation sickness and died soon after. Some sources also incorrectly claimed that