ABSTRACT
Reliable eyewitness accounts of a catastrophe supplement the later objective data and can provide a real sense to the reader of being there which cannot be captured in any other way, even by photographs. In the case of Chernobyl not many eyewitnesses were in the area outside the NPP at the time of the explosion in the very early hours of 26 April 1986 and there are relatively few records from the power plant workers who survived and the firemen. Other eyewitness accounts are given in chapter 5 from some of the physicians who worked as liquidators in the early days of May 1986.
