5. No One Knew How To Clean It All Up
No one in the Soviet Union had ever been through a situation such as the Chernobyl disaster before. Of course, this caused many problems and not just talking about lack of knowledge on what to do in the blast. The other major issue that the inexperience caused was that no one knew how to clean up the area. While they let the residents of Pripyat city breathe the radiation levels for nearly 36 hours before they did a mandatory evacuation, none of the officials wanted anything to do with the radiation as it was too dangerous.
Therefore, they worked to come up with a plan that would allow them to find people, who they called liquidators, to take care of the clean-up. Of course, at first, they tried the help of robots, but that didn’t work, so they had no choice but to use the workforce. Most men, who didn’t have families to worry about, were chosen to help out. According to some liquidators, they could decide to do the work but felt pressure as they didn’t want to risk jail time.