One of the very first catastrophic news events that I can vaguely recollect, partly because of the long-term devastation it brought to people, happened 24 years ago on 26 April: Chernobyl. Perhaps I remember the disaster retrospectively, as it were, because it was such a catastrophe and I have subconsciously manufactured memories. My long-term memory fails me oft, and while I can remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, anything before that, in terms of news, are fragements of memory or even figments of imagination. The vague recollections I have centre on people being worried, since the scale of the accident was not known initially, as the Soviet Union was not all that forthcoming with the information. Then there were images of the area and the reactor.
