On the human cost of tragedy

Okay, so I was reminded by a blogger at Daily Kos that yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Plutonium Page points out in her post that right now, most discussion of the disaster centers around numbers, particularly how many have died and how many are expected to die. She chooses to concentrate on the human aspect, and it makes for a really striking diary. Read it through, and then read through some of the I-was-there stories left in comments.