was no water left in the trucks. Misha filled a cistern and we aimed the water at the top. Then those boys who died went up to the roof – Vashchik, Kolya and others, and Volodya Pravik.... They went up the ladder ... and I never saw them again. [ 49 ] :54 Anatoli Zakharov, a fireman stationed in Chernobyl since 1980, offers a different description in 2008: I remember joking to the others, "There must be an incredible amount of radiation here. We'll be lucky if we're all still alive in the morning." [ 50 ] He also said: Of course we knew! If we'd followed regulations, we would never have gone near the reactor. But it was a moral obligation – our duty. We were like kamikaze . [ 50 ] The immediate priority was to extinguish fires on the roof of the station and the area around the building containing Reactor No. 4 to protect No. 3 and keep its core cooling systems intact. The fires were extinguished by 5:00, but many firefighters received high doses of radiation. The fire inside reactor 4 continued to burn until 10 May 1986; it is possible that well over half of the graphite burned out. [ 24 ] :73 The fire was extinguished by a combined effort of helicopters dropping over 5000 metric tons of sand, lead, clay, and neutron-absorbing boron onto the burning reactor and injection of liquid nitrogen . The Ukrainian filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko captured film footage of