Features combined footage from the HBO miniseries Chernobyl Episode 4, scene of people being sent to the rooftop of the exploded nuclear reactor to remove the graphite from the rooftop. All rights reserved to Home Box Office Inc., Sky.
GAME OF THRONES: This scene took us 2 months to shoot and I promise it will be the most suspenseful 90 seconds in TV history CHERNOBYL: hold my graphite
MrSkillns why even bring them out when they are on the roof ? Like they knew that whole area would have been very bad. I almost think it would have been even more distracting for them.
@@radiopadilla They took dosimeters to keep track of exposure. Ideally they were washed out after 25 roentgen, though few kept good track and 1 second on this roof was that much if not more even with all that cladding. The counter was supposed to signal to the audience danger, especially when he does exactly what the commander said specifically not to do, like look over the edge.
@@almightydeity did they actually have dosimeters with them? or is it just incidental soundtrack to show the audience that radiation is doing damage? its tracked over with the music, not a sound coming from the character
@@jorgepeterbarton Its incidental. Geiger counters are low range meters. What you can hear is equivalent to a couple hundred miliroentgen at best. Any geiger counter would lose it's shit (get stuck at "3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible") and then go completely dead before you even got on that roof. Maybe they had dosimeters on them to determine the total dose they got afterwards, but no handheld radiation detector that I know of would work at such high levels. And even if they did, they wouldn't be very useful. No time to even look at it while you are up there anyway and if you could, what would it matter? Whether it says 8000 R/h or 12000 R/h it means "GTFO or you are dead" either way.
@@Anygodwilldo looking at it doesn't do anything. its being close to highly radioactive material that does the damage. it also depends on the type of radiation source you are looking at. if its emitting gamma rays, then its going to go right through your clothes and cause damage. if its alpha or beta particles.. your clothes are usually enough to stop most of that. The danger would be having radioactive material such as dust sticking to you and being spread around inside your home, where it can expose you to dangerous amounts over time. or worse, it can end up in your body, where it is far more dangerous. that's why they show them washing everything that has been exposed.
@@Anygodwilldo Whether it is alpha or beta particles from inside your body or gamma rays from outside, the effect is the same. The DNA in your cells gets smashed to bits. Cells eventually die, but with the DNA destroyed, your body has lost the blueprint neccessary to replace them. So you die, cell by cell.
You can really feel the confusion and horror at the beginning when they enters the roof. Like "Oh, it's everywhere, where do I begin?!" And knowing they only have 90 seconds. These men are heroes.
@@WhattAreYouSaying bigger shovels wouldn't have done anything, at least not if the actual disaster was anything like the show shows. the shovels were just glorified levers, only there to help them pick up the big chunks.
@@sillyking1991 If they had bigger shovels they would have gotten more stuff off the roof in those 90 seconds, and fewer men would have needed to enter the roof. If the shovels were twice as big, they would have gotten twice as much graphite off the roof in 90 seconds, and 50% less men would have been needed. That makes sense in my head. I have seen real footage of the graphite removal from the roof, someone recorded it, and the shovels was exactly the same as in the series. The real footage is on RU-vid.
@@WhattAreYouSaying but was the graphite the same? Certainly at least some of it was. As it qas depicted in the show, bigger shovels wouldnt have helped becuase the chunks themselves were fairly large, and nonuniform in shape. You also have to remember, they may not have had access to.bigger shovels, not initially. Also also, larger shovels are gonna be harder to maneuver in tighter areas.
@@WhattAreYouSaying that stuff is heavy, and a bigger shovel wouldn’t solve anything as it is quite hard to lift something heavy and unbalanced with a shovel over a bigger distance. Especially not when you are freaked out.
@@hybridce99 Maybe if you would concentrate on something diferent that hate you would know, that the mask wasnt intended to protect from radiation but from the graphite dust. And this is exactly the same today
The other workers could do many trips because the amount of radiation they were exposed to, wasn't that much if they didn't look down into the reactor & just stayed on the roof. But the guy that went to the edge got a much larger dose, so any more trips would have been dangerous for him. Hence the "you're done".
@@Sojju7 I mean, if he stayed too long on that roof and the radiation really penetrated the suit, then theres pretty much nothing to do for him than pray.
"You either server 2 years in Afghanistan, or 2 minutes on that roof." That was what these liquidators were told before they volunteered on that roof, most of them never lived their full lives.
I've spent a good several minutes sitting here thinking about whether I'd rather spend 2 minutes on the roof or 2 years in Afghanistan. I may need a couple more minutes to mull it over.
Absolutely love the cinematography here. The shaky cam. You can feel the fear. The chaos. It really makes your skin crawl. This show is a true work of art.
Plus the feeling of being in full mop gear with a respirator on. You can almost feel that exhausted fall into the puddle towards the end. Crazy good film making.
I love how this guy HAS to look down. He’s just been told this amount of exposure has severe health consequences and could kill him YET the human mind is so curious that it’s willing to risk it all just to get a glimpse of truth . Amazing scene
"Do not look over the rail" "Take care not to stumble" "Take care not to fall" "Go left" *Looks over the rail* *Stumbles* *Falls into a puddle* *Goes right*
I love how they show real footage at 0:36. This show will forever be one of my favorites. Such an eye opener to the severity of what happened, I'm only 26 so I didn't know how bad Chernobyl was until I saw this. Thanks HBO
randomrazr Going back to the 'bullet' analogy in episode 2, imagine a gun fired at a sheet of metal. The bullet will be slowed down by the metal. Similarly, the uranium "gun" in the core fires a neutron "bullet". In this case, graphite is the metal that slows down the neutron. PS Not a nuclear physicist, but this is how I understand it. Someone from Reddit made a proper explanation: imgur.com/a/QqphbyO
@@randomrazr Neutrons fly around and crash into atoms which splits the atoms (fission) and releases energy, and also shoots off more neutrons, which will split more atoms. The probability of a collision is higher if the neutrons are going slower. Graphite is a "moderator". It slows the neutrons.
in half? More like near to nothing, he was so close to the reactor and the graphite, such amount of radiation must have had him dead within a few weeks
@Albert Fels BTW, to anybody reading this: If you like having a good night's sleep, don't google Cecil Kelley images before sleeping like I did. Wait until the next morning.
The temptation to look over the edge, regardless of how dangerous it is and being told not to, can be overwhelming. I know this because in the Army when we were at the grenade range where we were training with live grenades, Soldiers are instructed to stand behind a barrier that is about chest high before throwing the grenade. They then look at their intended target, go through the preparatory motions to throw the grenade and then throw it. They are then instructed to IMMEDIATELY take cover behind the wall and not to raise their head above the wall to see where it landed since technically they are still within the lethal blast radius. Yet, time and time again, we would see Soldiers remain standing to check it out and they would have to be pulled down by their instructor. Danger is fixating.
That's why the risk assessment for this states clearly that the Instructor will use necessary force to reposition the trainee. And signed by a General. What it means is they are one of the few Instructors literally authorized to beat you.
Even scarier when you remember that this is not a work of fiction, but a historical reenactment, that all of this actually occurred for the most part, with allowances made for minor bends in the truth for the sake of television dramatization.
According to the creator, about 90% of Tarakonov's speech is word-for-word from the real Tarakonov's speech. Still, hearing 'these are the most important ninety seconds of your life' carries a lot of weight, about as much as hearing 'You're done'
THere is footage of this speech. If you find hard enough you can find it. I saw it long ago but had fuzzy memories of it. But as soon as he started his briefing, I remembered the original that was very similar.
The real Tarakanov gave that speech to each and every one of the 3,828 men who were involved in this mission, in person. After hundreds of repetitions, his voice was hoarse and it hurt to speak, but he made sure each man understood what he was getting in to, answered their questions, and thanked them for their sacrifice.
I can't help but wonder... why didn't they try setting up a fire hose to the roof and then using the water to push the graphite bits around? Surely, a water cannon could pull that job off with minimal risk.
You know what’s fucking fantastic about this scene, they made 90 seconds feel like an hour, and if you want to depict proper horror and desperation, this is PERFECT
All of those mangled “pipes” you’re seeing when he looks over the railing are the control rods that were leaping up and down before the explosion. The detonation splayed them outwards, breaking the graphite that lined them into blocks that scattered everywhere. The core was now opened with blocks of graphite that were once in the core now emitting radiation all over the facility. He’s practically looking in to hell itself.
I don't think a lot of people noticed this, but at 1:45, the liquidator passes right by a fuel rod still encased in graphite: even before the tear in his boot and him looking down at the reactor, the liquidator was likely dead just being near that thing
Thats actually the rod that connects the graphite displacer to the boron absorber. If that was a proper fuel rod im pretty sure the dosimeter would've blown out his eardrums
@@vihurah9554 A dosimeter makes no sound. And you can be damn certain those poor men had no personal Geiger counters but that the sound is put in for us viewers.
These are the most important 90 seconds of your lives. Gets three scoops off the roof, looks over the rail twice, and falls over twice on the way back. GG comrade, GG.
Shit I just realized that someone was putting ear protection on the man in focus just as the instructor was saying "don't look over the rail, try not to stumble", etc. He missed critical information all in 5 seconds.
The crackling sound of a Geiger counter will forever be the scariest sound after this series. It's no wonder why it has received critical acclaim. My favorite series of all time!
that's the kind of person who gets work done, is conscious of his team. the guy who the camera followed is an example of the stupid one who you need to pick up so he doesn't drag you down
The way he stumbles and starts falling apart at the end isn't just random, either. Liquidators have described a mysterious side effect of radiation, from those who worked on the roof to clear the graphite, saying that "even the most brave and brazen soldiers seemingly lose their composure and fall flat on their feet before the invisible mental enemy of radiation." It's genuinely terrifying. We don't even know what happens to the human mind when it's bombarded with this much radiation because almost nobody has done it.
The fact that there’s no dialogue, the slow deterioration of the liquidator, the clicking, the sounds of the shovel, the weight of the rocks, that it’s all in one single shot, the grunts and breathing of the liquidator, that we don’t see his face, the heavy breathing when he’s back inside, the simple and reassuring sentence that’s he’s done his part, the haunting realization that he won’t be the last person to experience this and wasn’t the first and The fact that this is real.
What scared me the most is not only the nonstop clicking of the geiger meters but also seeing the liquidators touching stuff, and that they're so fast tired (a sign of the strong radiation)
I love how they play the reactor core as the villain in the film, from how when they get close the Geiger counter goes crazy to how if you even as to stand near it you hear horror music, even just looking at it has an eerie bad guy feel to it, you know it’s the main villain.
Remember those names - the first firefighters who arrived at the scene of the explosion and started combating the fire: Vladimir Pravik - died May 11, 1986 Victor Kibenok - died May 11, 1986 Leonid Telyatnikov - lived longest among these firemen, which is a miracle in itself. Died in 2005 of Chernobyl-related cancer. Vasiliy Ignatenko - died May 13, 1986. In 2006 posthumously awarded the title Hero of Ukraine. Nikolay Vaschuk - was instrumental in preventing fire from reaching reactor number 3. Died with the rest of his crew on the same day. Hero of Ukraine. Nikolay Titenok - died May 16, 1986. Hero of Ukraine Leonid Shavrey - miraculous recovery in the facility in Kyiv. Had bone marrow partially replaced which help the organism and DNA to fight off radiation exposure and sickness. Ivan Shavrey - the younger brother of Leonid. Also survived by miraculous treatment in Kyiv. Again, partial replacement of bone marrow. Petro Shavrey - the oldest brother. Also survived. There should be a book about this family of heroes or maybe a separate HBO movie. Alexander Lelechenko - electrician technician of Chernobyl NPP. Was responsible for preventing an additional hydrоgen explosion. Received lethal dose of radiation and died on May 7, 1986. Hero of Ukraine. The first wave of firefighters consisted of 28 men in total.
Also Valery Khodemchuk The night shift main circulating pump operator, Khodemchuk, was likely killed immediately; he was located in the collapsed part of the building, in the far end of the southern main circulating pumps engine room at level +10. His body was never recovered and is entombed in the nuclear reactor's debris
I used my stopwatch. From the time he's say go, to the first chime of the bell, 92 seconds passed. Considering it would take him a few seconds to put the watch down and ring the bell. This scene lines up exactly with how much time they would have actually been on the roof. It's one continuous take.
And to think that poor engineer was forced to go onto that same roof right after the accident with 0 protection AND look over the rail... he knew he was dead.
In fact, he wasn't forced. The records say that during the meeting he was told "If you like you can send your own man, however we would appreciate if you'll have a look with your own eye". He decide to there by himself. And there was no soldier with an AK behind his back. Even though, investigation process, lotta details of accident and taken measures are shown right, Series is not 100% accurate ( it's still pretty good thou)
Константин Лебедев of course he would rather sacrifice his own life than force another poor lad to take the plunge, i bet he felt his soul would burn in hell otherwise.
@@user-qp9uv1fe8g Wasn't it an implied ultimatum, though? They may not have had a physical gun to his head, but they weren't gently suggesting he should go look, they were _gently_ *suggesting* he *should* *go* *look*
Well he did look over the edge, trip and tear his shoe, get soaked in contaminated water, twice, and spent over 110 seconds on that roof. He might as well be glowing.
The pegged out docimeter sound is what makes this scene so chilling. This scene and the one with the soon to be dead technicians peering down into the blown reactor are two of the most bone chilling scenes I’ve ever watched in a movie/show.
Did not happen in real life. Surprisingly, despite the hysteria of this great series, very few people actually died. The show needed to demonstrate the most exaggerated situations. Although the Slavic mindset was well on display!
i work in the radiation protection field, and this was one of my favorite scenes in the show. part of my job is mapping out high radiation areas like this one, so that our workers can minimize their exposure. we always say, practice ALARA, and use time, distance, shielding. meaning, keep your dose as low as possible, by minimizing time in the area (the 90 second stay time), keeping your distance from hot spots (which they couldn't do in this area), and use any shielding you can (like when they lined up against the wall and were kept away from the opening). for the torn boot, the man would've received more exposure for a moment, sure, but the real problem there, and one we have to be prepared for, is the fear. he froze in place, just one wall away from all that debris, terrified of the ripped shoe, and what it could mean. but Tarakanov knew his shit. as soon as that man got back downstairs, he would've been stripped, showered/decontaminated, and frisked to make sure he wasn't bringing any spicy atoms back to the barracks with him. the one thing that really makes me laugh about this is the dosimetry, though. that roof was reading something like 10,000 Roentgen an hour. you wouldn't hear clicks and static. you'd hear a constant metallic screech. based off experience, if i heard that from a radiation probe, i'd guess it was reading less than 30 milliroentgen per hour, which is a *much* more survivable dose rate.
That's one thing that would have been a nice touch to add if they could have. The part you mentioned about the dosimeter. It would have been really effective from a thematic perspective if it goes from clicks/static to just a nasty metallic resonance sound. I feel that would have really upped the fear factor because it probably would have been bewildering to a cleaner sent up there. Like, shocking and scary.
regarding the dosimeter, would there be any point to having the soldiers wearing them? I feel like that would've just upped the fear response and there's no point in making these guys more terrified since that would lead to more mistakes and potentially costing more lives, whether through death or just a casualty because they're now in-firmed with radiation sickness
I'm 51 years old, and I've had some truly terrifying moments in that time. Rolled a truck down a 300' hill into a river, stalked by a jaguar, chased and shot at be narcos... None of that compares to when I was 24. I walked past a "pretty rock" in somebody's garden, and my fillings instantly started hurting. Bad. The terror came a second later when I had a flashback to my 10th grade science class. My teacher used to work at Los Alamos, and he taught us all about radiation. I knew right away I had just walked past a large source of it. Turns out that "pretty rock" was a 210 lb chunk of pitchblend that the construction crew dug up when they were building the house. I didn't have to get decon'd or even go to the hospital because the dose was so low, but for months I was 100% certain I was going to keel over and die at any moment. This scene captured that feeling perfectly.
@@djricane Like I said, the construction crew dug it up when they were building the house, nobody knew what it was and the owner thought it was pretty, so they put it in their garden. Never thought to question why the plants died/wouldn't grow near it... There have actually been a few large chunks of pitchblend unearthed here in FL. From what I understand they're fragments from the meteor impact near the Yucatan. Either from the meteor itself or the ground that got hurled into the air. The same reason why most of the pitchblend used in the earliest nuclear power experiments came from Tennesee.
This is without a doubt the most tense moment of this show. No music. No talking. Just the constant ever present clicking of their meters telling you all you need to know.
@@Dutch3DMaster And, in a way, there was another form of music: the Geiger counter. You know it gets tense the moments the cracking starts sounding more like what amounts to a steady tone, meaning that you are in the midst of hellacious levels of ionizing radiation.
Agreed. It really is Lovecraftian terror. The worst thing is that the Fear is totally unknown. It cannot be seen or heard, but the body can feel it. These men didn't even truly realize what was happening, despite what they had been ordered to do. Radiation is insidious and indiscriminate. The Geiger counter screaming is to me the single most horrifying part of this scene. That roof is literally poisoning the environment with every second. Anyone who set foot upon it was effectively committing suicide.
The irony of this scene is that it also exemplifies the best traits of humanity: 0:33 - Organization 1:22 - Courage in the face of danger 1:41 - Tool usage 2:04 - Curiosity 2:18 - Cooperation 2:45 - Determination 3:15 - Perseverance
bsgfan1 Speaking of tool usage, I just don‘t get why they had to carry the graphite on the shovels to the edge... Why not use wheelbarrows on the roof? Put the wreckage in the wheelbarrow, drive it to the edge, tip the wheelbarrow over.
@@Andromedos They would likely require too much exposure to radiation, and tipping would necessitate exposing their body parts over the edge basically sentencing them to death. That, the time limit, and the terrain would also kill the prospect of a wheelbarrow.
2:14 is the moment that made my eyes well up. Something about the other man coming over to help him. Neither of them are to blame and yet here they are having to fight through sheer terror and a ticking clock to help mitigate a potential global catastrophe. Humans have an unlimited capacity for cruelty to one another but also an unlimited capacity for coming together in the face of an existential threat. Well done.
Well I saw a video about burned firefighters clothes at a hospital basement at Pripyat. Nornaly it is 0,008-0,012 milisivert/h but there was 0,039milisiverts and firefighters clothes were 140-800 milisivert/h and bottoms of firefighters boots were 800-3900 milisiverts... As far as I know this basement is now closed with newly build walls to prevent tourists examine this deadly clothes.
One of my favorite pieces of this scene is the use of the Geiger counter pings to represent the danger of the situation. Each time the camera focuses on a piece of graphic or when the soldier looks over the edge the crackling intensifies. Fantastic use of sound here.
Here you go: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ti-WdTF2Qr8.html The guy explaining the stuff here is actually the one you also see in this scene telling them what to do and signaling them when to come back.
Can we just take a moment to appreciate that the people who did this probably halved their lifespans or worse. None of it was their fault but they soaked in that radiation anyway. True heroes.
@@jimmyelkordy3752 not really. Some did obviously, but roof operations were much better organized than shown in the show, most people who worked on the roof were well briefed and worked carefully and efficiently, exposing them to acceptable doses. While a significant portion of them did have heath issues down the line, halving lefespan is an overestimate.
@@pafnutiytheartist What perhaps spurred them on was the fact they were mostly ignorant of what they were up against. Nowadays, we all know about radiation, what causes it, and how to defend against it. But those guys knew nothing other than what they were told on that roof. It is just not enough time to assimilate the danger they were in. Knowledge of what was really happening was restricted to those with college education, which most of the liquidators did not have. You could say "ignorance is bliss", because most of them would piss themselves if they knew they were indeed walking to their deaths. All they knew was that their country needed them. They had to stop the flow of radiation, their own family´s lives depended on them. Pride for one´s motherland and for one´s duty is a serious motivator.
For anyone wondering why he got sick before he stumbled and cut his shoe. At 2:05 he throws the rock over the edge but took some seconds and kept looking down at the groun. Now he was specifically told to NOT look over the rail, which means while his head was leaning forword above that ledge, radiation hit him like a truck.
@@Thedutchjelle it does have fast time at high dosis tho, i accidentally expose myself to just a little bit of Cesium that used in lab that i thought was already decayed, i got dizzy in about 2-3 minutes
@@Thedutchjelle Yeah, I think you may have your facts wrong or we're all misinterpreting your original statement. There have been many instances where the effects of high dose radiation can be felt almost immediately. Louis Slotin's experience with the demon core comes to mind. Others with the elephant's foot. You get the idea.
This incident couldn't have been depicted on screen more perfectly than this show... The speciality of this show is that everything looks so real and gives u chills and it's scarier than any horror movie due to the fact that it makes u realise that this incident really happened
One of my favorite parts of this show is how efficient it is. With only 5 episodes it delivers a more compelling story than most shows hope to get near in several seasons. And it really helps that that every actor absolutely nails their performance. I still get chills hearing "Comrade Soldier. You're done."
oh...oh thats not a dosimeter screaming. The sound they played was actually relatively tame. When those things actually start pegging high it legitimately sounds nothing like it normally sounds.
Longest 90 seconds I've ever seen on film... I've no doubt that the scene is 90 seconds but each second felt like a lifetime. It's a shame that in reality for these men it was their lifetime.
I am from Kharkiv. One of the men who did this came to our school once or twice on the Anniversary. He had back problems, but fortunately no cancer (back then).
in reality it would max out and just screech a single tone, no meter you could hold in your hand in the 80's would have a cap high enough not to max out on that roof.
I read that the radiation on the roof at that time was 20,000 roentgen. So bio-robots recievied about 50,000 times worth of chest x-ray radiations in that 90 seconds work.
I'm pretty sure it was closer to 10,000 roentgen per hour but it is a lot still. The protective clothing also reduced exposure though so they weren't blasted with the full dose
@@eiteiei4063 if that’s true a lot of them would have died early or relatively soon as that’s about 2.7 Sv of radiation exposure in 90 seconds. And 3 - 4 Sv is 50% death within 30 days
@@junh4807 Many did die early, the TRUE numbers will never be known, because the Soviet Union suppressed ALL information related to this. Thousands of people who worked there died within a year. It's estimated that hundreds of thousands have died from cancer over the years due to the accident.
This series is so much scarier and fear-inducing than any actual horror series or film out there. The clicking of the Geiger counter and the evacuation announcement (the very calm and collected female voice saying "Внимание!" over and over again) put cold fear in my bones. This scene is where it peaked for me, I think. The way that the camera follows one of the clean-up guys, it's like we're there, chasing after him. And when he tripped and fell right into the water, I nearly threw up. 10/10 HBO. Very well done.
Agreed. This whole sequence horrifies me. One other that truly gets me is towards the end of episode 1 when Dyatlov is being carried to an ambulance. It's intercut with Sitnikov checking the roof and the firefighters exiting the scene, completely exhausted and already showing symptoms of what they now realized were not normal burns. In that short 2 minutes, all of their fates are cruelly aligned. Truly and horrifically unforgettable. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-yp2d7sxpvlo.html
