That sunday back in late May 1986, it was the 25th to be exact, is still in my memory like it was just 5 years ago.

I spent the whole weekend with my family and a lot of friends living in my area and their families on the countrysite not too far away from Vienna. We rented an old castle there that had facilities like a youth hostel, grilled sausages on a fire on a nearby medow and basically spent the whole weekend out in the nature. Non of us was watching TV or listening to the radio so we didn't hear the bad news untill we arrived back home in the evening. All in all spending this sunday outside was a bad thing to do as radio activity reached North and Middle Europe quite fast.

People from other continents probably don't know what was going on in Europe that summer, especially in June, as soon as it was raining people were adviced to not go outside the house. Kids were not allowed to go on playgrounds as the radioactivity was really bad in the sand boxes and the harvest of that year was bad as well.

Chernobyl is still vivid.

I was living here in South Texas and preparing to leave for Colorado. I was watching tv and saw the news report about this nuclear leak in some place I've never heard about until now. Immediately I thought of the Three Mile Island incident. I couldn't believe in our day and age of this happening, I just took it for granted that things were always secure and that people all over the world learned from past mistakes of how to harness this power. It's a scary situation.

That's one of the events of the 80s that I don't remember where I was when it happened. All I remember is watching a news item on tv about dioxin. At the time, I didn't understand anything anything about world politics, radiation, etc.

I only understood that all governments wanted to start wars and nuclear reactors looked very scary (those two large stacks). So when I heard about North America not knowing about Chrnobyl until the US spy satellites saw them, I interpreted it as yet another government trying to start a war.

Yup, the media was pretty bad back them to this...how old was I? Oh well, I was more oocncerned with the Thompson Twins breaking up.

I just learned that Tschernobyl obviously is the German way to write it, and not the whole world uses that. Interesting!