Chernobyl

For obvious reasons I’m not travelling at the moment, other than round the streets of Troon for my daily allowed exercise or to the local supermarket for some social distance shopping. I could do a blog about either or both of those activities but I’m not convinced anyone would want to read it, despite these activities being the highlights of the week. Instead I’m going back four years to a trip that people thought I was mad to undertake and even madder to take my kids with me. Or for them to take me for that matter.

On Saturday 26th April 1986 Elaine and I were in Cyprus, a week into our honeymoon. Unbeknownst to us, 1,100 miles north the world’s worst nuclear power disaster was unfolding in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. To simplify a complex chain of unfortunate events and no little political incompetence, Number Four reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded spewing radioactive contamination into the atmosphere and exposing the burning reactor core to the air. More contamination was released over the following nine days before the fire was brought under control. 49,000 people were evacuated, never to return, from the nearby town of Pripyat as a 10KM exclusion zone was set up around the reactor and later a 30KM exclusion zone which meant a further 68,000 people were displaced. Thirty years later those exclusion zones are still in place as radiation levels are still considerably higher than typical background radiation that everyone on the earth is subject to. Whilst that level is high enough to prevent people living within the 10KM zone, the effects are cumulative. Indeed, many people have worked within the 10KM zone as the three remaining reactors remained active for a number of years after the disaster and vital work on the latest containment device needed to be completed. You can also visit as part of an organised tour. Chernobyl tours have been running for a number of years now. Interest has recently increased thanks to the TV series Chernobyl which was aired, to critical acclaim, last year. Four years ago it only really appealed to people who liked to visit somewhere completely different to the norm. Step up my kids, Nicholas, Rebecca and I. I say kids, they were 27 and 22 at the time so please don’t accuse me of child abuse through the unnecessary exposure to radioactivity, they didn’t have to go. Indeed, Elaine had the opportunity to join us but declined on the basis that it sounded horrid. Disaster tourism wasn’t for her and who can blame her? But to me, and presumably to Nicholas and Rebecca, it looked as though it would be a fascinating trip.

Fascinating but not straight forward like, say, a trip to Costa Del Sol or a city break to Paris. Nothing that wasn’t insurmountable to hard-nosed travellers like us. Actually, it wasn’t very difficult at all. Flights from Glasgow to Kiev via Amsterdam with KLM were obtained and a hotel was booked through Expedia. There were a couple of companies offering Chernobyl tours from Kiev so we reserved our irradiation session and obtained some US Dollars with which to pay for it. A taxi from Kiev’s Borispol Airport delivered us to our hotel and we were good to go. In Ukraine things tend to be cheap. The hotel was no exception. It was a floating hotel on the River Dnepr just a little out of the centre but near to a Metro station. I seem to remember a room with breakfast was about £30 per night and for that money you got a small but clean and comfortable space with a view out over the river. I was to find that as an extra bonus you also got the sound of a couple shagging in an adjacent room at night. It turned out that whilst the hotel was indeed a hotel, it was also a bit of a knocking shop. Indeed, you could order ‘love’ off the room service menu if you so wished and there seemed to be quite a number of affection bartering going on in the public spaces. A great place to bring your kids. Still, as a base it served us well though I’d probably give it a miss were I to go back to Kiev. We had a day and a half to discover the city of Kiev. It turned out to be rather a nice place. Golden onion domes shone out across the skyline, there were impressive parks and interesting monuments, a Metro ride was about 12p and the food was dirt cheap, even at a supposed top end restaurant. From a personal point of view it had a fantastic aviation museum based at the city’s second airport, a rather scary taxi ride away, and it was good to visit Independence Square, site of many a revolution in the previous few years. At the time the conflict with the Russian backed rebels in the east of the country had just started and whilst it was many miles away from Kiev, there was much evidence of support for the Ukrainian troops fighting for their country. From a geeky point of view I’m glad I can now say I’ve visited the deepest subway station in the world and I really appreciate the extensive trolley bus network. I know, I’m a bit weird.

Visiting Kiev was, however, just a by-product of this trip. The main event came after our second night in the floating love shack when we rose early to get across town to Kiev’s main railway station. Our tour bus was waiting outside, the required number of dollars was handed over and we were soon on our way to one of the most notorious places on the planet. Being an English language tour, the bus was full of many nationalities, some of whom spoke English as a first language. The local guides spoke it pretty well too which was good as many facts and quite a few rumours about the disaster ware shared. It’s a good two hour journey north. Once escaped from the environs of Kiev, the scenery is pretty nondescript but a video on the bus entertainment system (three or four televisions in the ceiling) kept our attention. We reached the 30KM exclusion zone checkpoint. Several other tour buses were there and it took a while for them to be processed and for us to get through. The countryside became forest and many tracks into the woods were blocked with radiation signs. We stopped in a layby and were led into the forest. There, almost completely lost from view, was the village of Zallisya. Abandoned after the disaster, it had been reclaimed by the forest. We walked through the local shop and Palace of Culture – a Soviet community centre that every settlement had – and saw things that had lain there for thirty years. Or nearby, it is likely that previous visitors had moved stuff around for a better photo opportunity. It was quite surreal which set the tone for the rest of the visit.

We travelled on through the 10KM exclusion zone checkpoint. Our next stop was the Duga Radar station. This relic of the Cold War was an early warning radar which could see over the horizon and give some sort indication of the launch of ballistic missiles against the Soviet Bloc countries. It had been operational for four years when the disaster happened after which it was abandoned. It had never really worked particularly well so it was no great loss to the Warsaw Pact’s defence capability but it left behind an impressively huge aerial array and the accompanying military barracks. The latter were interesting with the walls still adorned with posters informing the soldiers on how to be good communists, something we would see more of later. People have been known to climb the aerial but we declined, something I do not regret four years on. Back on the bus we made one more stop before reaching the power station itself. It was at a nursery for the children of Chernobyl workers, just a couple of KMs from the plant. Obviously in a state of decay, the scene was made all the more eerie with abandoned toys scattered around the place. Decaying dolls with fixed smiles are the thing of horror movies and whilst it wasn’t what I would call spooky, it was clear how writers of the genre could be inspired by what we were seeing.

It was around here that our bus broke down. Now the thing about an exclusion zone is that most people are excluded from it so it could have been a bit of a sticky situation. A replacement bus was dispatched from Kiev but was at least two hours away. The guides, however, concocted a plan which involved moving us to another tour group’s bus whilst its occupants were discovering the delights of the power plant and Pripyat on foot. The poor bus driver was eventually abandoned in the middle of a nuclear exclusion zone as after a half hour delay we set off on the Russian language tour’s vehicle bound for Reactor Number Four. Of course you can’t get too close to it. Despite it being encased in a concrete sarcophagus for the previous thirty years, radiation levels are still very high. We got to within 300m. We had been given dosimeters for the trip which recorded the gamma radiation. Anything above 0.30 micro sieverts per hour, twice the background radiation in Kiev and the limit for permanent habitation, and the thing would emit a high pitched howl. This close to the reactor and every dosimeter was howling away. The display on mine showed 3.08 micro sieverts per hour, twenty times the background level in Kiev. It wasn’t a place to hang around in. There are people who had to though. The huge, arched new containment structure was in the final stages of construction. By the end of the year it would have made the half a kilometre journey and encased the reactor, making it safe for the next hundred years or so. I guess we were lucky to see the decaying concrete sarcophagus in the flesh. If you go now you will just see the containment structure. As an interesting aside we had a meal at the Chernobyl Canteen. This cafe remains open for those working at the plant. For five US dollars those on the tours can eat there too. The food is brought in from outside the exclusion zone, or so we were told, and whilst basic was actually quite good. A large family of patient feral dogs was hanging around outside awaiting any titbits though were informed not to supply them with any.

Fed, watered and hopefully uncontaminated, we bordered someone else’s tour bus for the short drive to Pripyat. This was the highlight of the tour. It was a town of nearly 50,000 inhabitants built in the early eighties specifically for the workers at the Chernobyl plant. It was in many ways a model Soviet town and those living there felt privileged to do so. Modern accommodation, good services and shops with goods in them showed just how important the plant and its workforce was for the Soviet Union. The morning after the reactor blew up, people living there went about their business as normal. The following day they were all evacuated never to return. Despite this, some parts of the town were still used for many years afterwards by those tasked with clearing up, including the swimming pool. Most of it, however, was left to rot and gradually be taken over the the surrounding forest. Our delayed journey meant our group had the place to ourselves. We visited the department store, a place so special we were told that people would travel from Kiev just to marvel at its well stocked shelves. The aisles of plenty have long since been stripped and lay collapsed and decayed. The Palace of Culture, a much grander affair than the one in Zallisya, was once the centre of the town with a large dance floor, now covered in the glass from the shattered windows, a cinema with just three remaining seats amongst the terraced flooring, a games room and many different rooms for party meetings, youth clubs and so on. From here we got our first glimpse of the Pripyat Funfair. The Ferris wheel has become something of a symbol of this ghost town. The fact is it never carried a fare paying passenger. The fanfare was due to open on May Day 1986, four days after the disaster. The dodgems had never clashed in anger it appears. Moving into the funfair itself set the dosimeters off once more. The area had been used as a helicopter landing pad in the days following the disaster and much radioactive dust had been deposited there by the choppers tasked with depositing lead and concrete over the reactor core. It was a great place for photographs.

A short walk through woodland that once contained streets brought us to the Pripyat Sport Stadium. As with the funfair this was due a grand opening four days after the disaster. The stand, complete with decaying wooden bench seats, looks out on to where a running track and football pitch used to be, now lost in the trees. Whilst it is unfortunate that the Pripyat youth never got to display their athletic prowess at the stadium, they did receive an education at one of several local schools. We visited one, a large secondary school. Classrooms still contained desks covered in books. Civil defence gas masks were left scattered on the floor and posters with the friendly face of Lenin clung precariously to the walls. In truth, the disaster happened at a weekend and the school would have been left neat and tidy but gas masks covering the floor makes for a more interesting photo than a closed cupboard and previous visitors and maybe even the tour staff themselves had moved stuff around to add to the eeriness of the place. This didn’t really matter though. We were promised and abandoned town and that is precisely what we got, even if we were not the first to discover it. Our last port of call was the swimming pool, still in use until the early noughties. It was a very long drop to the bottom of the deep end and if you were tempted, no obvious way of getting out. Like everywhere else, health and safety took something of a backseat, be we staring over the edge of a precipice or walking on decaying floorboards. It was worth the risks though. A sanitised Pripyat would not have been the same. We left Pripyat behind to the forest, at least until the following day’s tours pitched up. We transferred onto the replacement bus and headed back to Kiev, stopping briefly at the town of Chernobyl, just outside the 10KM exclusion zone. People still live there and it is possible to stay in the local hotel should you fancy taking a two day tour. Then, on passing the 30KM checkpoint we all had to pass through a turnstile which measured how radioactive we had become. Too much and we would be taken off to be scrubbed clean. Thankfully, everyone was allowed through. It was late when we arrived back in Kiev. It had been a long, yet fascinating day.

The following day we had time to wander through the Patriotic War commemorative park and see the Mother of the Motherland Statue. Facing east towards Mother Russia, this is an enormous relic to Ukraine’s communist past. Perhaps more accurate relics of its communist past are the village of Zallisya, the Duga Radar, Chernobyl Nursery, Chernobyl Reactor Number Four and the town of Pripyat. Ukraine isn’t a particularly affluent place. You can’t blame them for trying to earn the tourist dollar by exploiting the Chernobyl disaster. I’m certainly glad I got to see it before its profile was raised by the TV series. Not to mention before the bloody virus.