Every now and then this book makes me shout in astonishment

[garote]

The first patients from the plant had landed in Moscow soon after dawn on Sunday, April 27. They'd been met at Vnukovo Airport by doctors clad in PVC aprons and protective suits, and buses with the seats sheathed in polyethylene.

The specialists of Hospital Number 6, a 600-bed facility reserved for treatment of the nuclear workers of the Ministry of Medium-Machine Building, and home to two floors dedicated to radiation medicine, had cleared the entire department in preparation for their arrival. Some were still in the same clothes they had been wearing at the moment of the explosion. Many were covered with radioactive dust, and once they had been admitted to the hospital, their transport proved beyond the limits of practical decontamination.

The aircraft that delivered the first wave of patients was dismantled, and one bus was sent to the campus of the Kerchatov Institute, where it was driven into a pit and buried.

By evening on Sunday, a total of 207 men and women, mostly plant operators and firemen but also security guards who had remained at their posts beside the burning unit, construction workers that had waited at a bus stop beneath the plume of fallout, and the anglers from beside the inlet channel, had been admitted to the wards of the hospital. 115 of them were initially diagnosed with acute radiation syndrome. Ten had received such massive doses of radiation, that the doctors immediately regarded their survival as impossible.

-- "Midnight In Chernobyl", Adam Higginbotham