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

Today, on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, Google has added high-resolution satellite photos of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the abandoned town of Pripyat.

Above is the plant; the damaged reactor is on the left. In Pripyat, the ghostly ferris wheel was easy to find, but where’s the vehicle graveyard? Update: here it is. Hat tip to “di” and “pero69″ for their comments.

Twenty years ago today at 1:23:44, the Chernobyl NPP reactor number four exploded. Five thousand tons of lead, sand, and other materials were dropped on the resulting fire in an attempt to stop the spread of the radioactive cloud. The world learned of the accident when Western European nuclear facilities identified radiation anomalies and traced them to the Chernobyl plant, forcing the USSR to make its first public announcement on the matter.

By November, the ruined reactor was entombed in a sarcophagus, and the irradiated equipment abandoned nearby, but the human scale of the disaster remains enormous to this day.

Despite this, a thread of fascination with the abandoned cities, especially near-by Pripyat, pervades much of the peer-produced work related to Chernobyl (David McMillan’s photos are an outstanding example). Day tours of the area are available from SAM Travel Company Ukraine (and maybe here too, but where are the booking details?).

Because of the need for power, the remaining reactors of Chernobyl NPP were kept in operation until 2000, and and even now there are 12 RBMK reactors like those at Chernobyl in operation in Russia and Lithuania. Safety (and training, I hope) is said to have improved. Westron, a joint venture between Westinghouse and Hartron, is bringing Western-style safety systems to Eastern European power plants, even though they often get paid in IOUs. (Sadly, “Western-style safety” may not mean what it used to. Practice here.)

Search MaisonBisson for more nuclear related stories.

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

Nearly 20 years after the initial events of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 26 1986, the story is still unfolding. This month’s National Geographic Magazine tells of the “long shadow of Chernobyl” — grown children of the disaster now fear having their own children while some elderly residents return to their old homes inside the 1,000 square mile, still contaminated “exclusion zone.” The print article seemed to offer hope, noting that even the pines of the “red forest” — so called because they received so much radiation that it bleached the chlorophyl from them, and some say the trees actually glowed — are beginning to grow back now. But the multimedia companion materials tell a somewhat more morose tale.

A note at ibiblio, however, brings to mind how different our world was in 1986:

Chernobyl has become a metaphor not only for the horror of uncontrolled nuclear power but also for the collapsing Soviet system and its reflexive secrecy and deception, disregard for the safety and welfare of workers and their families, and inability to deliver basic services such as health care and transportation, especially in crisis situations. The Chernobyl catastrophe derailed what had been an ambitious nuclear power program and formed a fledgling environmental movement into a potent political force in Russia as well as a rallying point for achieving Ukrainian and Belorussian independence in 1991.

Time Magazine did a ten year retrospective and has an index to coverage, but Wikipedia’s entry is rich with detail and potential lessons.

One of the most interesting lessons may be that the reactor was not designed in ignorance of the instability that eventually caused the Chernobyl disaster, but as a reasoned and calculated approach to the problems of the time (makes me wonder what Henry Petroski would say about it). The reactor was designed to operate using light water and un-enriched natural uranium, a technical marvel so unique that the wikipedia entry on heavy water explains:

Heavy water is used in certain types of nuclear reactors where it acts as a neutron moderator to slow down neutrons so that they can react with the uranium in the reactor. Light water also acts as a moderator but because light water absorbs neutrons, reactors using light water must use enriched uranium rather than natural uranium, otherwise criticality is impossible. In effect to achieve criticality in a reactor, one must enrich either the moderator or the fuel.

Because uranium enrichment and heavy water production are both complex and costly, it’s easy to imagine the engineers proud of their accomplishment and accountants relieved. It’s the sort of scene that looks different in retrospect, but one that we’re quite familiar with.

The biggest lesson may be that the best plans and procedures can never be substituted for well trained, knowledgeable people. In this case, the plant’s operators had no training on the peculiarities of the reactor design, and so had no way of knowing how non-standard operations during the planned test would change the operating characteristics, safety, and stability of the reactor.

It is a sad irony that the reactor actually became less-stable during low-power operations, and sadder still that the operators had neither any knowledge of this, nor any indication of it in the control room.

And all of that was made worse by the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, operators had no way of knowing that the reactor had been breached, and they were all receiving deadly doses of radiation as high as 20,000 roentgen per hour.

Kerry Cupit’s Chernobyl gallery begins with a photo from that first day following the explosion at 1:23:47 that morning. While the plant operators were doubtful of any radiation risk, the firefighters and later “liquidators” were told nothing of it. The extreme levels of radiation were described by one firefighter as “tasting like metal.” He died soon after.

It wasn’t until the night following the explosion, with two people already dead and fifty-two hospitalized, that officials finally acknowledged the scale of the danger and ordered the the evacuation of Pripyat and the surrounding area.

The evacuation left a ghost town. And despite the disaster, this empty landscape has captured our imaginations. The fictitious story of Elena, the “kidd of speed” who toured the exclusion zone on motorcycle became legend in 2004, thanks largely to the eerie and dramatic photos of abandoned Pripyat.

Architectural photographer Robert Polidori visited in 2001. The resulting book, Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl, is a study of the haunting desolation and, perhaps, of the serene beauty of these modern ghost towns. Jury Kosin’s Chernobyl album reminds us of the people consumed by the disaster. The photo at the top, of the secondary school south of Chernobyl, comes from Greenpeace.

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

(about the photo)

The following report comes from CosmoBaker.com, which includes this preamble:

EDIT: The following is an email that was sent to my mother from one of her colleagues. Although I cannot substantiate the contents, after all the horror stories that I’ve heard so far, I though that this one was important to tell. Stand up and be counted. Spread truth. Stay awake.

C
—–Original Message—–
The following is a message from Tobias Wolff to his father, Robert Paul Wolff, professor in the Afro-American Studies Department at UMass Amherst, and contains an eyewitness account of two friends of Tobias who were trapped in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 11:07 PM

Subject: Saramago’s Blindness Revisited — an eyewitness account fromNew Orleans

Dad –

Forward this message to your friends in the department (and elsewhere) — it is quite something.

I found it linked in _rebekka’s Flickr photostream, where she remarks

Even if only half of what is written is true, it would be too horrible to imagine, yet i believe all of it is.

Please read. Please share.

Begin forwarded message:

Two friends of mine-paramedics attending a conference-were trapped in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. This is their eyewitness report. –PG
 

Hurricane Katrina-Our Experiences
 

Larry Bradshaw, Lorrie Beth Slonsky
 

Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreen’s store at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing. The milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat. The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers, and prescriptions and fled the City. Outside Walgreen’s windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry.
 

The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized and the windows at Walgreen’s gave way to the looters. There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices, and bottle water in an organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.
 

We were finally airlifted out of New Orleans two days ago and arrived home yesterday (Saturday). We have yet to see any of the TV coverage or look at a newspaper. We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreen’s in the French Quarter.
 

We also suspect the media will have been inundated with “hero” images of the National Guard, the troops and the police struggling to help the “victims” of the Hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed,were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators.
 

Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, “stealing” boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.
 

Most of these workers had lost their homes, and had not heard from members of their families, yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20% of New Orleans that was not under water.
 

On Day 2, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves, and locals who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina. Some of us had cell phone contact with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources including the National Guard and scores of buses were pouring in to the City. The buses and the other resources must have been invisible because none of us had seen them.
 

We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food, and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and new born babies. We waited late into the night for the “imminent” arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute the arrived to the City limits, they were commandeered by the military.
 

By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the “officials” told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the City’s primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole.
 

The guards further told us that the City’s only other shelter, the Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, “If we can’t go to the only 2 shelters in the City, what was our alternative?” The guards told us that that was our problem, and no they did not have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile “law enforcement”.
 

We walked to the police command center at Harrah’s on Canal Street and were told the same thing, that we were on our own, and no they did not have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and would constitute a highly visible embarrassment to the City officials. The police told us that we could not stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the City.
 

The crowed cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation and wrong information and was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, “I swear to you that the buses are there.”
 

We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched pasted the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.
 

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander’s assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.
 

We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.
 

Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and in the end decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O’Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet to be seen buses. All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot.
 

Meanwhile, the only two City shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery New Orleans had become.
 

Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let’s hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts.
 

Now secure with the two necessities, food and water; cooperation, community, and creativity flowered. We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps. We even organized a food recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).
 

This was a process we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself only. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. When these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.
 

If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in.
 

Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.
 

From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. “Taking care of us” had an ominous tone to it.
 

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, “Get off the fucking freeway”. A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.
 

Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or congealed into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of “victims” they saw “mob” or “riot”. We felt safety in numbers. Our “we must stay together” was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.
 

In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.
 

The next days, our group of 8 walked most of the day, made contact with New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search and rescue team. We were dropped off near the airport and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were assigned.
 

We arrived at the airport on the day a massive airlift had begun. The airport had become another Superdome. We 8 were caught in a press of humanity as flights were delayed for several hours while George Bush landed briefly at the airport for a photo op. After being evacuated on a coast guard cargo plane, we arrived in San Antonio, Texas.
 

There the humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief effort continued. We were placed on buses and driven to a large field where we were forced to sit for hours and hours. Some of the buses did not have air-conditioners. In the dark, hundreds if us were forced to share two filthy overflowing porta-potties. Those who managed to make it out with any possessions (often a few belongings in tattered plastic bags) we were subjected to two different dog-sniffing searches.
 

Most of us had not eaten all day because our C-rations had been confiscated at the airport because the rations set off the metal detectors. Yet, no food had been provided to the men, women, children, elderly, disabled as they sat for hours waiting to be “medically screened” to make sure we were not carrying any communicable diseases.
 

This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heart-felt reception given to us by the ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome. Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept, and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.

tags: bush, catastrophe, dead bodies, email, email forward, eyewitness account, eyewitness report, forward, george bush, george w bush, hurricane, hurricane katrina, katrina, louisiana, new orleans, new orleans louisiana, nola, police brutality, shame, w

Reuters: FEMA accused of censorship:

“It’s impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story,” said Larry Siems of the PEN American Center, an authors’ group that defends free expression.

Brian Williams’ MSNBC Nightly News Blog:

While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. …a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media… obvious members of the media… armed only with notepads.

…the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome)…

[emphasis added --Casey]

Josh Marshall/Talking Points Memo:

…it’s pretty clear that a key aim of the Bush administration’s takeover of the [New Orleans] situation is to cut off press access to report the story.

Photo credit: Reuters, published in Mainich Daily News’ Katrina photo special. Request: honor the Katrina dead and the lessons they can teach us, don’t hide from them. Don’t ignore them the way Bush did while they were still alive.

tags: brian williams, bush, bushh, catastrophe, censor, censor this, censor this!, censorship, dead bodies, death, fema, george bush, george w bush, government, government censors, government censorship, hurricane, hurricane katrina, joshua micah marshall, katrina, louisiana, media, msnbc nightly news, national guard, new orleans, nola, pen american center, shame, talking points memo, w

Times-Picayune editor Jim Amoss answered questions for On The Media’s Brooke Gladstone. Amoss and his staff have been covering the catastrophe in New Orleans as only locals can.

Some of the best reporting I’ve seen on this has come from the Times-Picayune, and I was quite amazed when I discovered the electronic edition Wednesday. Despite the damage, they appear to have start releasing a print version again and are distributing it in the city and in communities where refugees have fled. For so many displaced people, and in areas where power prevents other communications, I can imagine how valuable this thread is.

tags: catastrophe, electronic edition, exile, hurrican katrina, hurricane, interview, jim amoss, katrina, locals, louisiana, new orleans, newspaper in exile, newspaper, on the media, refugees, times picayune, times-picayune, timespicayune

update: there’s more pictures, even some video (look for links marked with the QuickTime logo), and a bundle more nuclear and Chernobyl-related stories.

I almost fell into a trap that has snared quite a few before me. bookofjoe recently pointed to the story of Elena, a motorcycle riding woman who claimed to brave the radiation to tour the area around Chernobyl, the nucluear reactor that exploded disasterously in 1986. A commentor quickly pointed out that her story has some history and is surrounded by controversy. The site has been changed a few times, removing many of the bits that seemed most eggregiously wrong to informed readers, but still failing to earn their approval.

It turns ot that Elena is most likely Lena Filatova, and her pictures and story are from an organized bus tour of Chernobyl. One critic, Tony Brown, writes that he met Rimma Kiselytsia, Elena’s tour guide, during his April 27, 2004 tour. Brown reports Rimma’s criticisms as such:

Her father is NOT a scientist. She does NOT have an ‘unlimited access’ pass to Chernobyl.

She has never been on a motorcycle inside Chernobyl. If you notice, the pictures including her bike stop when she gets to the access control point. They did NOT let her in.

While she HAS been to Chernobyl, she did exactly the same tour I did, and she went with her husband.

Brown tells stories of staged shots and moved artifacts. He repeats Rimma’s complaint:

…they seemed to be trying to take photos for shock value — not how the place really is.

…Rimma is very annoyed about the whole affair — she’s getting phone calls from movie producers wanting to make movies about this “heroic” girl. She’s getting people demanding the same unlimited access pass that Elena supposedly has. These do not exist, and she’s sick of explaining it to people.

Brown has a 360° panorama from Prypyat that he took on his tour. His site stands unfinished at chernobylholiday.com.

David McMillan at the University of Manitoba has posted pictures of the area during the years 1994 through 1998. More pictures of Pripiat can be found at pripiat.com. It would seem that official information about Chernobyl comes from Chernobyl.info: “the international communications platform on the longterm consequences of the Chernobyl disaster.”

Ray Girvan writes:

In many ways, this is no different from many other travelogues. In television celebrity journeys, such as Michael Palin travelling around the world, we suspend disbelief. Obviously such trips are engineered, stage-managed so that Palin is in no danger and invariably encounters interesting people and situations. But there’s a fuzzy line between entertaining fictionalisation and dishonest portrayal; on balance, I think Elena’s account has drifted across it.

I mostly side with the critics, but I never saw the original version of the web site, in its most innacurate or deceptive form. I found it a few days ago. Other sites offer pictures, the Elena story gives a narrative, and while the critics argue with her details of travel in the area, her descriptions of what she encountered are generally accepted. Most of the information is common knowledge, but her telling reminds us of the tragedy. What follows is my edit of her story. Pulling out the bits that are contested, reorganizing the bits that are interesting.

What about the radiation?

To begin our journey, we must learn a little something about radiation. It is really very simple, and the device we use for measuring radiation levels is called a geiger counter . If you flick it on in Kiev, it will measure about 12-16 microroentgen per hour. In a typical city of Russia and America, it will read 10-12 microroentgen per hour.

1,000 microroentgens equal one milliroentgen and 1,000 milliroentgens equal 1 roentgen. So one roentgen is 100,000 times the average radiation of a typical city. A dose of 500 roentgens within 5 hours is fatal to humans. Interestingly, it takes about 2 1/2 times that dosage to kill a chicken and over 100 times that to kill a cockroach.

This sort of radiation level cannot be found in Chernobyl now. In the first days after explosion, some places around the reactor were emitting 3,000-30,000 roentgens per hour. The firemen who were sent to put out the reactor fire were fried on the spot by gamma radiation. The remains of the reactor were entombed within an enormous steel and concrete sarcophagus, so it is now relatively safe to travel to the area.

What happened here?

On the Friday evening of April 25, 1986, the reactor crew at Chernobyl-4, prepared to run a test…

What followed was a combination of the effects of human error on poorly designed, unforgiving technology. The test went wrong in ways the operators never expected or intended. The uranium was allowed to react uncontrollably, causing a steam explosion that blew the reactor containment structure. A further explosion ignited the graphite control rods.

Once graphite starts to burn, its almost impossible to extinguish. It took 9 days and 5000 tons of sand, boron, dolomite, clay and lead dropped from helicopters to put it out. The radiation was so intense that many of those brave pilots died.

The smoke and steam from the fire released radioactive material into the atmosphere and spread it far beyond the towns and farms of Chernobyl.

The Communist government that was in power then kept silent about this accident. In Kiev, they forced people to take part in their preciously stupid labor day parade and it was then that ordinary people began hearing the news of the accident from foreign radio stations and relatives of those who died. The real panic began 7-10 days after accident. Those who were exposed to the exceedingly high levels of nuclear radiation in the first 10 days when it was still a state secret, including unsuspecting visitors to the area, either died or have serious health problems.

The government had few plans to deal with a disaster such as this.

In keeping with a long tradition of Soviet justice, they imprisoned all the people who worked on that shift – regardless of their guilt. The man who tried to stop the chain reaction in a last desperate attempt to avoid the meltdown was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He died 3 weeks later.

50 kilometers west of the reactor, Elena comes across a farmer in a horse-drawn cart.

3.500 people [...] either refused to leave or returned to their villages after the meltdown in 1986. I admire those people, because each of them is a philosopher in their own way. When you ask if they are afraid, they say that they would rather die at home from radiation, than die in an unfamiliar place of home-sickness. They eat food from their own gardens, drink the milk of their cows and claim that they are healthy…but the old man is one of only 400 that have survived this long. He may soon join his 3,100 neighbors that rest eternally in the earth of their beloved homes. It appears that the people with the most courage were the first to die here. Maybe that is true everywhere.

Checkpoint
Checkpoints block the roads into the “exclusion zone” surrounding the reactor. The towns and roads outside this area remain accessible, even if largely abandoned. While earlier pictures showed Elana on a motorcycle, no picture inside the zone does.

As I pass through the check point, I feel that I have entered an unreal world. In the dead zone, the silence of the villages, roads, and woods seem to tell something at me…something that I strain to hear…something that attracts and repels me both at the same time. It is divinely eerie – like stepping into that Salvador Dali painting with the dripping clocks.

Trucks and equipment are everywhere, left to rust and nuclear decay where they stopped.

The fire engines never returned in their garages, and the firemen never returned to their homes.

These fire engines are some of the most radioactive objects in all of Chernobyl. The firemen were the first on the scene, and they thought it was an ordinary fire. No one told them, what they were really dealing with.

Much of the equipment was used to respond to the initial emergency or in the government’s hasty cleanup efforts.

The Liquidators are those people who were recruited or forced to assist in the cleanup or the “liquidation” of the consequences of the accident.

As a totalitarian government the Soviet Union forced many young soldiers to assist in the cleanup of the Chernobyl accident, apparently without sufficient protective clothing and insufficient explanation of the danger involved.

Over 650,000 liquidators helped in the cleanup of the Chernobyl disaster in the first year. Many of those who worked as liquidators became ill and according to some estimates about 8,000 to 10,000 have died from the radioactive dose they received at the Chornobyl Power Plant. This group apparently includes those who built the containment building over the destroyed reactor No. 4 which is called the sarcophogas.

The town of Chernobyl is 18 kilometers from reactor. “The entire population was evacuated in 1986, but not until long after the danger enveloped them.”

Traveling north, a few kilometers from ground zero, the reactor can be seen looming beyond a stand of trees.

The patch of trees [...] is called red — or ‘magic’ wood. In 1986, this wood glowed red with radiation. They cut them down and buried them under 1 meter of earth.

The original plant had four reactors. The explosion in one damaged another irreparably, but left the other two operable. The plant continued on those two reactors for fourteen more years, until it was finally shut down for good in 2000. The sarcophagus, however, is disintegrating due to its hasty construction and the effects of radiation.

Four kilometers north of the reactor stands Pripyat, Elena’s “ghost town.”

It was founded in 1970…. 48,000 people lived here and loved their town. In 1986, it was a modern, green and cozy place to live.

At first glance, Ghost Town seems like a normal town. There is a taxi stop, a grocery store, someone’s wash hangs from the balcony and the windows are open.

But then I see a slogan on a building that says – “The Party of Lenin Will Lead Us To The Triumph Of Communism” …and I realize that those windows were opened to the spring air of April of 1986.

Elena finds signs of abandoned lives at every turn. Posters for the Labor Day parade fill a room in a government building.

May 1st never came in this town. On the day of the disaster, the North wind brought the first clouds here and it is said that people ran for their lives as they searched for their children in the atomic smoke. On April 27th, the whole population was evacuated and this street has not seen a parade since…and probably never will again.

Children had to part with their favourite toys. People had to leave everything, from photos of their grandparents to cars. …People had homes, motorcycles, garages, cars, country houses, they had money, friends and relatives. People had their lives. Each had their own niche. And then in a matter of hours , their entire world fell to pieces.

After a few hours trip in an army vehicle, they stood under a shower, washing away radiation. Then they stepped in a new life, naked with no home, no friends, no money, no past and with a very doubtful future.

Viewing danger…

Standing on the roof of the highest building in this empty town brings a feeling of being completely alone in the world – like this whole town is. On the day of disaster, many people gathered on this roof to see the beautiful shining cloud above the Atomic Power Plant.

Elsewhere…

The day after the accident, this place on the bridge provided a good view of the gaping crack in the nuclear containment vessel that was ruptured by the explosion. Many curious people came here to have a look and were bathed in a flood of deadly x-rays emanating directly from the glowing nuclear core.

Epilogue
While Chernobyl is the most remarkable of nuclear accidents, it’s only one of many. Our interest in it goes beyond the tragedy, however. Ray Girvan reminds us that

there’s something intensively evocative about these images. I find it a bit unsettling that the scale of human disaster here is so easy to forget, and one responds instead to the aesthetics of these wistful empty landscapes. Perhaps it’s evoking a back-to-nature romanticism that’s strongly rooted in Western literary tradition. David Platt’s Where London Stood explores why abandoned/ruined cities evoke such emotion, and even a nostalgia, as evident in the Web’s fascination with urban ruins.

Elena’s followup to the Chernobyl tour is The Serpent’s Wall, the site of the German army’s offensive against Kiev. I’ve not seen reports of factual errors or gross deception about that site, but prudence requires readers treat it carefully.

Update: a lot of people are searching for coordinates to Chernobyl. Here’s a street map of the region via MultiMap.com and here’s Google Map’s satellite photo of the reactor. The approximate decimal latitude and longitude are lat=51.388550, lon=30.111465.
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