Midnight in Chernobyl begins with a bang: Alexander Logachev and his team of firefighters race to a fire billowing from the Chernobyl power plant - something they've seen for years and something which they don't know will ultimately result in their deaths.
The Chernobyl power plant, as Adam Higginbotham later explains in the book, is on fire because of a combination of poor reactor design and human error. Logachev and his crew, much like all of the firefighters in Pripyat, Ukraine, fight against a fire it cannot possibly put out no matter how much water they throw at it. After all, they're fighting a radiation-induced fire, something that needs materials like sand and Boron thrown at it to put out.
Initially, the Soviets respond to the disaster in Pripyat very poorly. Many rush to the power plant to help stop the fire despite the radiation.
Their response continues to be inept until the Soviets send in a crisis management team led by Boris Shcherbina and Valery Legasov, who instruct sand and Boron be dropped on the power plant to stop the fire. This works, but the threat still exists.
To that end, they race against time to stop the power plant from causing further damage to the environment -- all while trying to prevent the world from truly knowing what is happening in the Soviet Union.
Midnight in Chernobyl is the story of how and why the disaster happened, how it was cleaned up, and the fallout because of it for the Soviet Union, the world, and the people who live there.
