The specialists and management from the plant who had remained behind to man the station were still nominally led by Director Viktor Brukhanov and his chief engineer, the once-bombastic Nikolai Fomin. The two men continued to sit by their phones in the dimly lit bunker beneath the plant, awaiting instructions from the government commission. But they were wrung out by exhaustion, radiation exposure, and shock. Fomin had remained in the bunker for five days, curling up to sleep beside the humming equipment in the ventilation room. Since the final evacuation of Pripyat, Brukhanov and the other
...more
