Mark Nelson’s Pripyat series on flickr is full of the pictures of desolation that people seem to be looking for as we solemnly honor the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

Google added high-resolution satellite photos of the area yesterday, and Pripyat.com offers both stories and photo galleries to help us remember.

It is there that I learned that Rimma Kiselica, the woman who has guided so many of those who’ve reported from the dead-zone, died on March 19.

Meanwhile, it turns out that people have started to graffiti the town. Mary Mycio, who wrote Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl, takes great offense at such things:

For someone like me, who considers Pripyat a monument — with universal lessons about folly, tragedy and our complex relationship with our planet — this approaches desecration.

While I respect Pripyat as a monument, Mark’s picture above does make me wonder. In a command economy, who orders somebody to make bumper cars or other carnival rides? How did the Soviet system work for such things?

1986, 20 years, 26 april, 26 april 1986, abandoned city, april, catastrophe, chernobyl, chernobyl nuclear explosion, chernobyl nuclear power plant, chernobyl tour, chernobyl-4, chnpp, chornobyl, disaster, ghost town, history, nuclear catastrophe, nuclear disaster, nuclear explosion, nuclear power, nuclear power plant, nuclear reactor, photos, pictures, pripjat, pripyat, radiation, reactor fire, russia, soviet, soviet union, tchernobyl, ukrain, ussr

Posted April 27, 2006 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Politics & Controversy. Tags: 1986, 20 years, 26 April, 26 April 1986, abandoned, abandoned city, april, catastrophe, chernobyl, chernobyl nuclear explosion, chernobyl nuclear power plant, chernobyl tour, chernobyl-4, chnpp, chornobyl, disaster, ghost town, history, nuclear catastrophe, nuclear disaster, nuclear explosion, nuclear power, nuclear power plant, nuclear reactor, photos, pictures, pripjat, pripyat, radiation, reactor fire, russia, soviet, soviet union, tchernobyl, ukrain, ussr.

1 Comment(s)

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI

User contributed tags for this post: