They never said just the face - in the movie they only SHOWED the face. For all you knew watching the movie, their whole body could have looked like that, but it was covered up.
At that point it’s too late. Everyone should consider themselves dead. The essential point, and what managers refuse to believe, is that successful heroism is unreliable. Therefore, systems that depend on it are doomed to fail. Failing early usually means fewer deaths.
:::scratches head:::
So, are you saying it would have somehow been better if those firefighters/liquidators at Chernobyl had simply sat down outside the exclusion zone and refused to mitigate the effects of the accident, leaving radioactive crap to blow around/get washed into rivers/whatever? Maybe they should have just left it all there so folks downwind - you know, women, children, their own families perhaps - would die horribly of radiation sickness?
I wasn’t talking about the job aspect, I was referring to the guts it takes to walk into a hazardous or lethal situation to deal with a problem that MUST be dealt with irrespective of the government currently in charge. If there had been a benevolent democracy in charge how would it have been different? There would still need to be a clean up and there would still be a lack of tools to do it without endangering human beings.
Those are what the few men unlucky enough to have to work on the roof wore. (They still all died within hours.)
The rest of the Chernobyl liquidators wore NO protection at all. Some of them had surgical-style face masks, which offered no protection from the radiation.
Broomstick: Two points about Chernobyl:
[ul]
[li]It was a failure of heroism: A success of heroism would have been people working in the plant for years and dying slowly of radiation sickness and cancer. The meltdown was quite expensive in terms of lost equipment and land.[/li][li]The Free World found out the same decade: The same year, in fact. The eyes of the world were on the Soviets and it would have been politically infeasible to spread Pravda instead of the truth. That was the kind of openness that presaged the end of the Soviet Empire.[/li][/ul]
It always starts as a special case. Then the cases stop being quite so special. (Unless, of course, heroism fails and the world finds out.)
The cure is what happened with Chernobyl: Enough public attention and public outrage to force things to change. Not that the changes are always for the best, of course, but some of them are likely to be by the “throw shit at the wall” principle.
In a benevolent democracy, there might have been enough public concern that a reactor without a containment shell couldn’t be built. Were that the case, you might have had something more like Three Mile Island than Chernobyl, without the need for people to sacrifice their lives to clean up the mess. It’s usually better to deal with problems before heroism is required.
was similar, because it showed the attitude of the Russian higher ups. Basically, the workers/cosmonauts were expendable. Take the SOYUZ spaceship=it failed in testing, and the designer (Koroloyev) wanted it stopped and totally redesigned-but the governemnet said no-go ahead. And so Colonel Komarov was sent t his death-the parachute system failed-Komarov slammed into the earth at 400 MPH.