"In the Nuclear Fall-out Zone..."
Trip Start
Jun 14, 2011
1
34
49
Trip End
Aug 21, 2011
Kiev, Ukraine
Sunday, July 31, 2011
burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the
rivers, and upon the fountains of waters;
And the name of the
star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became
wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made
bitter.
Revelations 8:10-11
Evacuation notice for Pripyat:"For the attention of the residents of
Pripyat! The City Council informs you that due to the accident at
Chernobyl Power Station in the city of Pripyat the radioactive
conditions in the vicinity are deteriorating. The Communist Party, its
officials and the armed forces are taking necessary steps to combat
this. Nevertheless, with the view to keep people as safe and healthy as
possible, the children being top priority, we need to temporarily
evacuate the citizens in the nearest towns of Kiev Oblast.
For these reasons, starting from April 27, 1986 2 p.m. each apartment
block will be able to have a bus at its disposal, supervised by the
police and the city officials. It is highly advisable to take your
documents, some vital personal belongings and a certain amount of food,
just in case, with you. The senior executives of public and industrial
facilities of the city has decided on the list of employees needed to
stay in Pripyat to maintain these facilities in a good working order.
All the houses will be guarded by the police during the evacuation
period. Tovarishchs,
("Comrades") leaving your residences temporarily please make sure you
have turned off the lights, electrical equipment and water off and shut
the windows. Please keep calm and orderly in the process of this
short-term evacuation."
I spent most of the day yesterday within the Exclusion Zone around Chernobyl, visiting both the reactor itself and the abandoned city of Pripyat. It was a much more exhausting experience than I realized at the time, and I didn't have the energy to write about it when I returned. In fact, the moment we boarded the bus at the final checkpoint to leave, I fell asleep and didn't really wake up until we arrived back in Kyiv. I realize the following sounds a bit awkard in places, but I'm in a bit of a hurry to post, so please excuse me.
At that time that I was there, I was focusing more on poking around, listening to the guide and taking photographs, and it was only after I returned to the hostel that I started to process what I had experienced. I'm still working on digesting the information, and I think it will take me some time. The half-life of one of the elements is 825,000 years, which means that for all intents and purposes, men have ruined that piece of the Earth forever.
We left Maidan Nezhalezhnosti (the main square in Kyiv) shortly after 9 am, and drove nearly two hours to the Exclusion Zone. At the 30 kilometre mark, we passed through the governmental checkpoint at Dytyatki, where our passports were examined and compared to the official list. We re-boarded our bus and drove to the actual town of Chernobyl, where we met our guide Yuri at the Chernobinform office.
Before I actually write about what happened yesterday, let me give you some background information. Some of this is common knowledge, and some not so much, having only been released in the last few years. On the night of April 25-26 1986, technicians at reactor number 4 in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant were actually conducting a test of the system. At 1:23 am on April 26, an explosion rocked reactor number 4. The roof was blown off, and radioactive material spewed into the open. A fire raged - the initial firefighters on the scene were not equipped to deal with radioactive material, and many died before the next morning. The full details were not completely reported to Gorbachev until several days later. What frightening information has recently been released is that there was a possibility for a much larger, second explosion. They estimate that this explosion would have erased Minsk, the present-day capital of Belarus located 340 kilometres away from Chernobyl, from the map and rendered much of Europe uninhaitable. Just inside the town of Chernobyl is a monument to the firefighters who died trying to extinguish the blaze. The inscription reads, "To those who saved the world." It's not much of an exaggeration.
There are no accurate death toll counts for the disaster. People are continuing to die as a result of their 1986 exposure to the material. Children are still affected by it - there's a Children of Chernobyl charity set up, and my host mother's niece (about my age I guess) was sent to Italy from Belarus in order to receive treatment.
With all that in mind, you might wonder why I wanted to go at all. I'm fascinated by it, and tours have been running there for 10 years. It's recognized by UNESCO, and I'm fairly confident that the international community wouldn't sanction something that was blatently unsafe. We had a number of dosimeters with us, and the background radiation in Chernobyl town is now almost normal. I probably received the same dosage of radiation that I would have from a trans-Atlantic flight or an x-ray.
Upon entering the Zone, you're struck by how empty it is. The road stretches out before you through gorgeous green and wooded countryside, and there are no other cars on it. You are alone. It's deathly quiet. When you reach the town of Chernobyl, over 10 kilometers away from the reactor, things are quite different. A few thousand workers still maintain Chernobyl, and live in the town for 15 days on, 15 days off.
The area around the town itself has been inhabited for over 1000 years. The name "Chernobyl" translates into a type of wormwood, hence the connection to the biblical citation. The more superstitious say that the Bible predicted the disaster, as exposure to lethal levels of radiation leaves a bitter taste the mouth of the sufferer.
After being briefed and signing our waiver, we made our way back into the bus and drove to the reactor. It was strange to be standing only a few hundred meters from Reactor #4, the reactor that was to have such a profound impact on life as we know it. After stopping there, we drove to the abandoned city of Pripyat.
Pripyat is chilling. It was built as a city for the workers of the plant, and is only about 2 kilometres away from the reactor. It was home to nearly 50,000 people on April 25; they had a large Palace of Culture, the Hotel Polissya, and a swimming pool and school. There was a cafe, a restaurant a river port and a railway station with a link to Moscow. While life in the Soviet Union might not have been all peaches and cream, life here was good. There was an active social life, people had jobs, and the buildings were new. They had children, and an amuseument park was set to open on May 1, 1986 with a large Ferris wheel and bumper cars. The Palace of Culture was decorated with an inspiring Soviet mural of Ukrainian cultural life, and the mural is still there. When you walk inside, it's like walking into a time machine. You're in a building that hasn't been used since all this meant something, since a time when the giant Soviet star atop a nearby building wasn't being used ironically. The CCCP 60! poster that lies on the floor was there when people cared about the USSR. The nearby shopping centre stocked all manner of goods- the signs still hang that advertise beer, cookies, frozen fruit and vegetables and cheese and tvorog. Life must have been good...but that all changed with the explosion at Chernobyl. Gone are the days of shelves stocked for the workers. All that remains is broken glass, upturned shopping carts. The buildings were looted for scrap metal, and the windows have broken over time. It looks like a bomb went off, or a movie set. You can't believe it's real, that in this very store on April 25, people went grocery shopping and then headed out into the main square of the bustling city.
The school isn't much better. Trees are growing through floor boards, gas masks are rotting in a room. Books are strewn about; in one room, a doll's stroller lies, broken and forgotten by the child who used to play with it. There's glass everywhere, and we have to be careful. I limit my exploring because I'm not keen on having an accident in one of the most radioactive places on earth.
We move on to the swimming pool. The entrance to sports complex is nearly overgrown - 25 years of disrepair will do that. The boards on the basketball court are warping and falling apart, and the long-since drained swimming pool is full of the broken glass from the huge landscape windows that used to shield it from the elements. It's hard to imagine the splashing and the yelling that takes place in modern swimming pools happening here. There is nothing here but death and barreness.
The amusement park has begun to fall apart; the boards on the swings and bumper cars have rotted away. The Ferris wheel with its yellow cars still stands tall, surrounded by highly radioactive moss. Yuri points the dosimeter at it, and it goes crazy. "Don't step here," he says. "It's dangerous." Pripyat was cleaned, but there are still pockets of radioactivity. He says it might technically be possible to live there, but you'd need to know where the problem spots are, and there are too many other logistical problems to make it a reality. When the city was evacuated, one man refused to leave. They found his body a few days later. Pripyat, however, fared better than other settlements. One was entirely buried because it was too radioactive - the people left and will never be able to return, not even to get their possessions.
We didn't go in any apartment blocks, perhaps because of a lack of time or perhaps because they are too unstable. The hotel has recently been placed off limits to tourists, as according to Yuri, it could collapse at any moment. As interesting as it would have been, I'm almost glad we didn't go into private flats. Although some people were able to come back and retreive some things, others did not. I'm not sure how I would feel about poking through the remnants of somebody's life, a life they had to leave abruptly and without a chance to say goodbye. Perhaps the disaster is still too fresh, too real...if it had happened 200 years ago, I would feel differently. I just don't think I could bring myself to sort through the belongings of somebody who is, hopefully, still alive. In an age before cloud computing and the internet, some of these people just had to up and leave their wedding photos and pictures of their children behind. It's absolutely tragic.
Strolling through the overgrown and cracking streets, it's hard to believe this was a town and that these were real roads. It just seems so totally unihabited. One tour company that advertises trips to Chernobyl states that Pripyat is like a mummy - it has a body, but no soul. On the way into the Zone, the bus was initially full of chatty tourists, but then, as we watched the video they showed us and realized the full enormity of what we were going to see, everybody fell silent. On the return journey, most people seemed emotionally exhausted from the day.
The sheer destruction that was wrought upon this part of the world by mankind is incredible. It's hard to believe that this is all because of us, people, and that we can't blame it on some outside force. Chernobyl is almost a metaphor for the entire Soviet Union, I suppose. It claimed an untold number of lives, and when one little mistake was made, the entire thing blew up. The total number of liquidators - those who helped clean up - will probably never be known. The death toll almost certainly won't, nor will the long-reaching health issues. Many of the liquidators were young men between the ages of 20 and 30. Some of those who are still alive say that they had to do it, that it was their duty to save the world, but dear God, what a sacrifice! They still visit Moscow's hospital #6, the same one the victims were taken to for treatment in 1986.
It wasn't an easy trip. Am I glad I went? Yes. Would I recommend other people to go? Definitely. Would I go again? I don't know. It's not the radiation that worries me, it's what you see. To think that all this is because of mankind defies words. One friend who went a few years ago remarked on it being death incarnate. I would find myself agreeing with him. I'm fairly sure this will haunt me for along time.
UPDATE: I have uploaded most of my photos to the blog. I apologize for the quality of some of them; they were taken from a moving bus. Some may be grainy because I had to up the ISO because it was dark; others may be blurry because of the light. There are some duplicates; I didn't have time to cherry pick them so I just threw everything on here.
UPDATE ON THE UPDATE: If I label everything, I'll be here until next year, so I just gave them all the same name. Basically, we start off past the checkpoint at Dytyaki, then we're in the office with Yuri our guide explaining things, then you'll see Chernobyl Cat who was wandering around the office, then the reactor. After that we go to Pripyat - first to the school, then the fitness centre, then the main square and the Palace of Culture and finally the grocery store. Next we stop by the river point and cafe where you'll see the world's largest mutant bee that landed on me, and then the radiation detector (it says dirty and clean on it) and my lunch. Last thing you'll see are the gigantic catfish that live in the Chernobyl cooling pond.
Comments
Must have been awful to leave your home not realizing you weren't coming back. You wouldn't have brought so much along, photos, momentos etc. Poor people.
Indeed. Some were later allowed back to Pripyat I think, but probably not the buried town. The sheer scale of the tragedy is what gets me...so many people were affected. Russian miners were bussed in to dig a tunnel to the reactor - they worked round the clock in 50 degree temperatures and drank contaminated water. Young Soviet reservists, most in their 20s, were ordered to shovel radioactive material off the roof in order to clear it. The radioactivity was so bad they could only spend 40 seconds on the roof. I think half a million were involved, though I'd need to check the number.
It was an especially timely visit, given the Fukishima stuff. The Fukushima 7 were brave beyond words. With radiation poisoning, you initially get vomiting etc and then recover. You feel fine, but then it starts to eat you from the inside out. Sores open up down to the bone. One man said it's like being an apple with a worm in it.
The thing that gets me is that stuff that could probably kill you looks fine. We saw a small apple bush growing in the town square, for example.
I see you have a monster wasp on your leg. Hmmm!!! Pretty eerie place all right, and terribly sad too.
yes, a mutant I think! I didn't see it at first (my bag was in my line of vision)
but the Russian guy standing in front of me just stopped and pointed. He
didn't even know what to say, and then slowly showed it to me, took a photo
for me and flicked it away.
Oh the reason I'm wearing my headscarf around my neck like Indiana Jones
is because my blouse was open at the top, and there are ticks in the area.
The last thing I need is to be bit by a radioactive tick and turn into a superhero.
That's a great blog entry. I've never read anything about Chernobyl since the accident so this was really informative to read.
Glad to hear you found it informative! Chernobyl and the surrounding exclusion zone are very eerie, strange places, and a bit of a testament to the degree to which we humans can really destroy our world. Are you thinking of visiting it yourself? I'd be happy to recommend the company I went with - they replied to all my emails quickly and were helpful when the government temporarily suspended visits right before my arrival.