It’s hard for those of us in the modern era to grasp the true horror of the Chernobyl disaster. Even a deep dive into the Chernobyl meltdown timeline can only reveal so much about the very real, visceral consequences of the event. Putting the sequence of events that led to Chernobyl into context takes an event that American history books casually summarize as a horrible accident and paints the incident for what it really was: a series of compounding mistakes that produced one of the greatest environmental tragedies in human history.