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Thinking back to 20 years ago, it’s the splashing in yellow rainwater that Antonina Sergieff vividly recalls.

The third-year graduate student didn’t know it then, but the unnatural color of those puddles in her hometown of Gomel, Belarus were due to radioactive particles spewing from a nuclear explosion 80 miles away.

Surrounded by ancient pine forests, the Chernobyl nuclear power station exploded during the early morning hours of April 26, 1986, setting off a raging radioactive fire that expelled over 190 tons of toxic material into the atmosphere.

Today, on the 20th anniversary of the incident, the Russian languages and literatures student can look back to the explosion and accept a childhood surrounded by radioactive contamination.

“We all jumped in the puddles with the yellow stuff. ... You don’t see (it in) the air, it doesn’t materialize. But when you see the yellow dust, you see radiation,” Sergieff said.

The accident was originally caused by a small testing error that resulted in a chain reaction in which highly pressurized steam literally blew the top off of a nuclear reactor.

The result was the release of 100 more times radiation than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, according to the United Nations issue brief on Chernobyl.

Among the unstable elements released were iodine-131, caesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239. Scientists say that exposure to such elements, especially in such high doses, impairs critical cellular functions and damages DNA.

When these elements first reached Sergieff 20 years ago, they came in the form of yellow rain.

It was not long after that residents in her hometown knew it wasn’t simply “pollen” – which is what government officials assured them, she said.

Soon, people started losing their hair, pictures of deformed animals sprouted up in independent newspapers, and incidences of cancer in Belarus skyrocketed, Sergieff said.

According to the U.N. brief, cases of breast cancer in Belarus doubled between 1988 and 1999, among other increases.

Tatyana Abrazhevich, Sergieff’s mother, said she and friends would periodically try to make and develop photographs, but “it was all blank: the level of radiation was so high in those days, that it was impossible to photograph,” Abrazhevich said, as translated from Belarusian by Sergieff.

Rumors soon started to spread about the radiation and people did what they could to protect themselves.

“For me, the big thing was that my mother always wanted me to wear a handkerchief. Protect your head! Protect your head! I would put it on, and then when I turned the corner I would take it off. The good kids would always wear their handkerchiefs,” Sergieff said.

Abrazhevich told her daughter that the government’s explanation was given in such a “calm voice” that no one recognized the danger.

“They told us not to worry. Not to go nuts. But then a very popular English radio station started broadcasting about the radiation. (The government) told us not to worry, that it was American propaganda to undermine our spirit,” Sergieff said.

The practice of downplaying the severity of such disasters, and at times refusing to discuss any information at all, was common within the Soviet’s sphere of influence, said Richard Anderson, a UCLA political science professor who also studies Russian politics.

The reality of the situation revealed that Soviet officials had cut corners when building the power plant and that now they weren’t quite sure how to deal with the ramifications.

The nuclear power station was built without any sort of contamination dome, an integral part of every American reactor being built at the time.

“The accident wouldn’t have endangered anyone’s health if the Soviet state had built a containment dome. Their policy of building nuclear plants without containment domes is typical of a dictatorship’s complete disdain for people,” Anderson said.

The gloomy clouds of radioactive particles that made their way through Europe and Asia left an impression on everything from the vegetation in the region to the halls of the Soviet parliament.

In fact, Anderson cites the Chernobyl accident and the political implications of its cover-up as a determining factor in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

The 10 days during which the radioactive fire raged were by far the most lethal, scientists say, but millions of Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians went about their daily business without knowledge of the true danger.

In fact, six days after radiation began falling from the sky, the region’s residents marched with signs reading “Workers of the World Unite” in mandatory festivities praising the communist system.

While such parades are no longer obligatory in Belarus, radioactive contamination is still a part of people’s lives.

Staples in the Belarusian diet include blueberries and mushrooms, both of which “soak up radiation like a sponge” and which people now try to stay away from, Sergieff said.

“What can people do? People tried to protect themselves for the first couple years, but then you just give up,” she said. “Nothing is ever normal; everything is just a little bit abnormal.”