FNC reporter Dana Lewis' reporting from Chernobyl, Ukraine is just heartwrenching and stunning. He is a brave man to bear witness to the physical and emotional suffering of the living and the dead at the site of the world's worst nuclear power disaster. Lewis will be reporting on this story on Fox News throughout the day today and Wednesday, and tonight on "Special Report with Brit Hume" Lewis will present more on the enduring human toll of the disaster, 20 years on. Lewis has footage of the 18-mile area around Chernobyl that apparently looks more like a war zone than anything, but considering that firefighters, and Soviet soldiers, and other workers were forced by the government to shovel radioactive waste after the accident, I guess you could call it a war zone, complete with crimes against humanity. Check out Lewis' Reporter's Notebook; he talks to survivors and raises some scary questions.
Nearby there is a graveyard of vehicles used in the Chernobyl catastrophe: 2,000 helicopters and fire trucks and even the buses that evacuated and relocated some 200 thousand people.
The first thing you notice in that graveyard is all the hoods are open. Look closer and the engines are gone. The security guard says there have been a lot of looters, but the local administration has also been selling off the contaminated engines. Where are they now? No one knows.
Firefighter Anatoly Zakharov's truck is likely there in that field. Of the 28 firefighters first on the scene with him that morning in 1986, 12 of them are dead.
Today Zakharov shows us scars on his leg from radiation burns, his knee where a cancerous tumor was recently removed and says he spends up to a month in hospital every year getting blood transfusions and bone marrow transplants.
"Just before my friends died, they all said the same thing: their bones hurt and it hurt just to move." Zakharov said. "That's how I feel now."
