Feb 13, 2007
Chernobyl: This is Not a Dangerous Place?
Researching a potential Chernobyl disaster vacation I came across more pictures this time, along with very haunting graffiti that has gone up, apparently for the 20th anniversary last April, silhouettes of children playing and other spooky but insanely poignant images. There are pictures of the abandoned town of Pripyat, and the graffiti, both on the BBC site, and the 26-04-1986.com site. There’s a lot of interesting stuff on flickr, and don’t miss Phil Coomes photos.
The first reactor exploded (became an unstable mass of white hot nuclear goo) at 0123 Saturday, April 26, 1986. According to the BBC:
Most people spent the Saturday outside, enjoying the unusually warm spring weather. Sixteen weddings took place.
The town was only evacuated 36 hours after the accident, while the evacuation of nearby villages took several more days.
Almost sounds like FEMA managed the disaster…
I think you should go there and see the cyclops babies.
I’ve thought about this too … there’s a novel i think by Martin Cruz Smith about an investigator who gets to know the people of Chernobyl that never evacuated. The pictures are haunting. They remind me of the national geographic pics from Indonesia, I think, of the people who harvest scrap metal from the rusting hulks of container ships.