It isn’t as if Emergency response plans and staff have not been available.
If coal miners can be dug out of a mine nearly a mile deep on short order, why isn’t there more wherewithal to go into the nuclear plant and bring it under control?
The big lesson to learn here, is that consolidating all emergency response in the hands of a few is not a winning solution.
We don't have supermen who can go through many feet of concrete and steel and with their bare hands pick up tens of tons of molten, radioactive goo that would kill you in seconds.
According to available information, repeated explosions made the plant uncontrollable and inaccessible. This is big, heavy stuff; you can't send a volunteer with a crowbar to lift a 30" steam pipe and weld it, while it is spewing 1,000 psi of radioactive, superheated steam right in your face. This is when robots come into play - exactly as it happened at Chernobyl. At very least you need bulldozers with lead shielding and a large number of workers, so that they can be swapped out before they get too much radiation damage.