7. Nearby Cities Weren’t Evacuated, Even Though They Needed To Be
Not only did it take officials around 36 hours to evacuate the residents of Pripyat, but it took them even longer to think about leaving other nearby cities. Officials never evacuated all the areas they should have. Because the radiation leaked for so long, radiation levels reached Sweden, which is almost 30 hours away from Pripyat, according to the disaster guidelines, this meant they should have evacuated that whole area. Unfortunately, they never did, and hundreds of thousands of people suffered for their poor decision.
Part of the reason officials did not evacuate all the areas that protocol told them to was because they didn’t want to cause alarm to people as they were trying hard to act like the situations wasn’t as bad as it seemed. The other reason could be that officials didn’t know how bad it was themselves. To them, the damage happened in the city of Pripyat. Therefore, this city became their danger zone, and as long as people left that area, everything would be fine. Of course, years later, everyone knew this was not the case.