Pour yourself something warm. April 26 is one of those dates that carries genuine weight – from a catastrophe that reshaped how the world thinks about nuclear power, to the end of a manhunt that gripped America, to the loss of one of the most beloved entertainers who ever lived.
1986 — The night the reactor blew
At 1:23 am on April 26, 1986, the chain reaction in Reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine went out of control. Several explosions triggered a large fireball and blew off the heavy steel and concrete lid of the reactor, releasing large amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere.
The engineers running the overnight safety test had little knowledge of reactor physics. They had disabled the emergency cooling system. When the power surge came, there was nothing left to stop it.
The radiation that escaped into the atmosphere was several times that produced by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and was spread by wind over Northern and Eastern Europe, contaminating millions of acres of forest and farmland. Nearly 8.4 million people in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia were exposed to the radiation.
The Soviet government tried to cover it up. Only after Swedish authorities reported the fallout did Soviet authorities reluctantly admit that an accident had occurred. The 47,000 residents of the nearby city of Pripyat were told to pack lightly and take their documents – they would only be gone a few days. Most never went back.
The response involved more than 500,000 personnel and cost an estimated US$700 billion – making it the most expensive disaster in history. Today, Chernobyl remains one of the most haunting places on earth – an entire city frozen in 1986, a radioactive exclusion zone that will not be safe for human habitation for thousands of years. The amusement park in Pripyat still has a Ferris wheel that never turned. The children’s school still has textbooks open on the desks. Today is International Chernobyl Disaster Remembrance Day.
1865 — The end of the manhunt
One hundred and twenty-one years earlier, on the same date, one of the most dramatic manhunts in American history came to its end in a burning tobacco barn in rural Virginia.
John Wilkes Booth was one of the most famous actors in America when he shot President Abraham Lincoln during a performance at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on the night of April 14, 1865. He was 26 years old. He had expected to be celebrated as a hero of the Confederacy. Instead, he fled into the night with a broken leg, hiding in swamps and barns, increasingly bewildered by the universal condemnation that followed him.
When Union troops finally caught up with Booth and his accomplice at the Garrett farm on April 26, they gave him the option of surrendering before the barn was burned down. His accomplice surrendered. Booth refused. He was shot in the burning barn — in almost exactly the same place on his body where he had shot Lincoln twelve days earlier. He died on the farmhouse porch at sunrise, reportedly whispering: “Useless. Useless.”
1989 — Goodbye to Lucy
Lucille Ball died on April 26, 1989. She was 77. The woman who gave the world I Love Lucy – one of the most watched television programs in history – had suffered an acute aortic aneurysm just days after appearing publicly in good health at the Academy Awards. America was stunned.
Ball was not just a comedian. She was a television pioneer – the first woman to run a major Hollywood studio, co-founding Desilu Productions with her then-husband Desi Arnaz. Desilu produced Star Trek and Mission: Impossible, among dozens of other shows. She was also, as millions of Australians who grew up watching I Love Lucy will attest, simply one of the funniest human beings who ever lived. The chocolate factory scene alone. The grape-stomping scene. The vitameatavegamin scene. Any one of them would have been enough for a career. She gave us all of them.
Come back tomorrow for another spin through the calendar.