Same with the Chernobyl disaster. There was a breif moment in time when the engineers could have safely shut the reactor down, but after that moment passed, it

Same with the Chernobyl disaster. There was a breif moment in time when the engineers could have safely shut the reactor down, but after that moment passed, it became a "choose you own doom adventure" and the rest of the story is more or less about how people coped with that largely unknown fact.