My Photo scholarship 2010 entry
Worldwide | Wednesday, September 15, 2010 | 5 photos
October 2009 I found myself on a plane flying to Kiev, Ukraine with two good friends. We were (to the horror of our families) heading for the nuclear exclusion zone of Chernobyl. 23 Years prior the nuclear facility suffered an explosion sending 90 times the amount of radioactive material into the air than that of the Hiroshima bomb. The immediate result was evacuation, the lasting result; a generation of birth defects and an uninhabitable "zone of exclusion" that will remain dangerously radioactive for another 20,000 years.
Riding in a small panel van with our barely English speaking driver and guide we passed military checkpoint after military checkpoint, going deeper into the zone of exclusion. Our first stop; about 40 feet from reactor no 4, the one that blew. You'd never suspect a thing; quiet, rich thick forests filled with young trees, grass, soil. Much less of a Mad Max world and more of national park. The reactor was more mausoleum than anything else at this point, large concrete dome over the failed reactor, a memorial in front.
We entered the town of Pripyat next. A town of 50,000 that disappeared nearly over night. Basketballs laid half empty on the court, a kindergarten dismissed early with books still on desks. A beautiful modernist hotel lobby once of glass and steel now at the mercy of the elements. As close to a time capsule town as anywhere in the world. Trees growing through marble tile floors, Soviet hammer and sickle still crowning nearly every minimalist building. A trip back in time, preserved closely to the day residents left it.
The silence was nearly deafening, no chirping birds, no barking dogs, no horns, no cars, no people. In 23 years of abandonment, nature was well into taking back the city. Life was living, minus humans.
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