Chernobyl

The first international news event I remember being conscious of was the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant which occurred on April 26, 1986. I would have been twelve at the time of the accident. While I remember the Challenger disaster earlier that same year–we sat and watched the news reports come in while sitting in Mr. Kelley’s 6th grade classroom–it was Chernobyl that imprinted itself on my young mind. On and off over the years since the disaster I remember seeing/reading news and magazine articles about the accident itself and its aftermath. There was something haunting and ghastly about what happened in that place. It was an accident, after all. I am not here to state the facts of the event or to assign blame. I am not here to recount the moment by moment events of that fateful night. You can read any number of books or watch documentaries or even the recent HBO miniseries (which I do recommend) to learn any or all of that. Most anything you want to know, you can find given the time, energy, and resources. And when in doubt, ask a Librarian for help! 🙂

That said, I recently spent two days in the Exclusion Zone that is Chernobyl and Pripyat. There are two questions I wish to answer here–one asked by my sister, the other by a dear friend. I will endeavor to do so in this post. I’ll get to them in just a moment.

I conceived the idea of traveling to Chernobyl about a year ago upon researching and learning that one could in fact do so. According to our guide, Sasha, tourists have been visiting Chernobyl since 2003. Other articles or reference sources I’ve read put the date for official tourism to 2011. No matter! I was there on November 20 and 21 along with nine other travelers–we were four Americans, three Brits, two Chinese, and one Canadian. Three of us were female, seven were male. Our guide was male and Ukrainian/Russian (he never said a negative thing about Russia or the USSR). We visited Chernobyl, Pripyat, and stood directly in front of Reactor #4–now contained inside first, its sarcophagus, AND then also under the new ‘safe confinement’ built by Novarka, a French company, and completed, if I recall correctly, in 2018.

The first question I want to answer came from my sister. Upon arriving home to Turkey, in a WhatsApp message, she asked if I knew what motivated my fellow travelers to visit the site. I know that our ages spanned from the early 20s to the late 50s, with all but two being younger than myself. But that’s ALL I know! It never occurred to me to inquire WHY this diverse group–in ages and nationalities–wanted to visit the site. As a self proclaimed “dark tourist” I am never surprised to meet others like me. You simply feel part of a tribe and that is enough. I guess you can say I assumed that they–like myself–were fascinated with this infamous place. The accident at Chernobyl had an impact on the globe and also required many nations to band together to help clean up and contain the site. They continue to do so.

In retrospect though, how does someone who is say 22 years old and born in 1997 have interest in an event that took place 11 years before their birth? I do not know. Even our guide was born after the accident. I regret that I didn’t have this conversation with every other person on our tour bus. Damn!

The second question requires a longer reply, so I hope you will bear with me. A dear friend from Colorado messaged me on the day I departed for the Ukraine with the following comment and questions:

“I’ve read much about the disaster, of course, but no piece of writing has conveyed what I want to know: what does it FEEL like in that place where so much went wrong? Does the Earth feel quiet?”

While I read her question as I arrived into Kiev, reading it after visiting the site and again after returning home I discovered it was the perfect question to be asked. I do not need to recount the facts or show you pictures of every site which has already been exhaustively photographed. I do not even want to spend my time telling you that two days in Chernobyl exposed me to less radiation than the 2.5 hour flight from Izmir to Kiev (even though I just did!). But I would like to express what I felt.

It was not scary. It was not exciting or thrilling. Over the course of the two days, I found myself often in quiet contemplation trying to rectify (a) the uncertainty of what I expected to encounter, with (b) the reality of standing right in the middle of it all. If I had to describe it in two words, they would be: strange and interesting.

It was eerie in places, especially in Pripyat. The once wide and spacious boulevards (2.5 cars wide on each side in the heyday of the early 80s) of the up-and-coming newest city of the USSR are now hardly wide enough for one vehicle to pass on open asphalt/concrete. It felt disconcerting to stand in a place that once, not so long ago, was teeming with young life–more than a third of the inhabitants at the time where children and the median age in 1986 was 26 years. Signs still hang over the aisles of the central grocery store. I felt strangely suspended in time and as if I were in someone else’s long forgotten memories. Before we walked the streets of Pripyat we climbed to the top of a 16 story apartment building on the edge of the city. It was breath-taking to see all the abandoned buildings of the city between us and Reactor #4 off in the distance, as well as the expanse of forest that loomed out in every direction. I have to note that the trees and ground vegetation very much resembled the north woods of my childhood and youth spent in Northern Michigan. For this reason I experienced a strange small sense of being “home.”

Our guide told us we were welcome to explore the actual apartments on our way down the 16 story building. It was strange to walk past the wide open elevator shafts (two in the middle of the building). I realized that no where in America would tourists be allowed access to walk amongst such rubble and decay and wide open gaping spaces–even if it was a concrete building! I wandered back one hall on an upper floor and peeked into apartments. I saw two twin beds with mattresses decaying and cold air blew in through the broken windows. I saw ovens lying on their sides in kitchens where once a woman cooked for her family–proud to live in this new city where her husband’s job provided four times the salary of an average worker in the whole of the rest of the USSR. I felt a strange hollowness and melancholy. But I was also grateful to be able to be there, standing alone, in that cold and dusty place. To have a moment of silence, by myself, in a place where, as my friend said, so much went wrong. No other tourists or voices to invade my thoughts and contemplations.

The town of Chernobyl had people living in it. There was a small grocery store where we stopped on day one before arriving to the “hotel” (in reality, a hostel) for the night. Most of us bought beer for the evening after learning that our hotel would only sell alcohol between the hours of 19.00 and 21.00. You can imagine we were looking forward to a drink to unwind after our full first day, and to have the opportunity to connect with our fellow travelers. My friend Ginger and I got better acquainted with two Americans and the Canadian. But strangely, as my sister pointed out, we did not discuss WHY we were there. We shared back stories of our lives and future travel plans. 

The hostel was constructed of three floors of rooms with double beds and shared baths in the hall. The food was cooked onsite and the women working there lived and worked in the area, as did men who provided security and transportation and so forth. There were apartment buildings around us that had lights on at night and first thing in the morning. Street dogs barked throughout the night and greeted us in the morning as we departed. Yes–people are living in Chernobyl right now. I do not know the rules or requirements. And it should be noted that the town of Chernobyl is farther from the Power Plant than Pripyat is. I do know that 2-3K people are working in the Exclusion Zone on a regular basis. There are public buses traveling the area, and women that cook food in a cafeteria every day to serve the workers of the plant (this is where we had our lunch on the second day–it was yummy!). This is not something I knew or expected. I envisioned a fully contained and abandoned site. But that is not the case.

Of course there are plenty of settlements in the exclusion zone–96 total–that were abandoned in the days after the accident. Nearly all of them remain abandoned and we walked through a few of them–exploring inside the empty homes and structures. At the start of the tour our guide informed us that there are about 400 “resettlers” that have moved back to the smaller abandoned villages. One of the options for the tour is to visit these people to ask questions and see how they live. The ten tourists in my group did not choose that option. We wanted to see more sites such as the Radio Duga (aka The Russian Woodpecker), a secret Russian Cold War site.

But I digress. What did it feel like to be in a place where so much went wrong?

It felt eerie as it was void of human life. And yet, it felt alive and abuzz thanks to Mother Nature. Plants and trees and the earth are consuming everything within the exclusion zone, bit by bit.  As we visited in late November, the earth was covered in yellow and brown leaves that were quickly decaying under the weight and dampness of recent precipitation. The air smelled fresh and clean outside; inside the buildings (schools, stores, homes and apartments) there was dust and peeling paint everywhere (no doubt of the lead variety!). Some of my comrades had geiger counters (addl purchase for the tour) and they sometimes beeped indicating they were above the .3 microsievert allowed level. But then the guide would simply reset the threshold on the device. As I mentioned before, my two days of radiation exposure in the zone was less than the radiation exposure of a three hour plane ride.

The woods that surround Pripyat and the other abandoned settlements are thick and dense. Nearly all the trees in the surrounding area are new growth (if not all) as the liquidators bull-dozed the trees that died from the initial radiation blast. They were then buried in the ground with concrete to contain the radiation. The Ukrainian National Chernobyl Museum had a station which explained that 75% of the forests in the area surrounding Reactor #4 were coniferous. They absorbed a huge amount of radiation from the accident and died shortly thereafter (dubbed the “red forest”). The audio recording said the trees and surrounding vegetation actually saved humans from worse damage by receiving so much of the direct radiation blow. This is not something I had considered or thought about.

***For those that choose to visit Chernobyl and therefore Kiev, I HIGHLY recommend the aforementioned Museum. It has a self-paced audio tour in English (and a few other languages) that was primo, imho. I also think that going to the museum AFTER seeing Chernobyl was the right choice. But perhaps going before would also be good.

I felt, and yet feel, in awe of Mother Nature. Even as man constructed something of his own making that led to death and destruction, She continues to cleanse and heal and repair. I know that one shouldn’t grow crops in the earth of that area and I did ask about burning the wood of the trees currently growing there (there would be radiation particles in them from the soil). I think this could be a potential problem. If the vegetation were to experience a drought and become dry, a wildfire could easily blaze through this swath of land and release, I think, radiation into the atmosphere while burning. And yet, I’m not sure how the forest should be managed to minimize the impact. Perhaps my father, a retired forester, will make a comment using his educated knowledge. (wink, wink, Dad!)

BUT, Mother Nature is alive and well and doing all she can to repair what we damaged. The area did feel quiet BECAUSE there were so few humans (especially in the abandoned villages and the forests that surrounded them). I saw workers only at checkpoints and near structures of the Power Plant facility, and of course the other tourist groups that we encountered (only a handful).

So yes, it was a quiet and eerie place but that’s because it IS a ghost town. A place once active and teeming with life–movement, voices, laughter, joys and fun–is now empty. And will be for many years and decades to come. I am glad I went, and I recommend to anyone that if they go, schedule a two-day trip. One day would be rushed and hurried.

I can’t exactly say I was “happy” to have been there, but I can say I feel satisfied with my experience and the moments in which I was able to contemplate the lives of those that once lived there, and the magnitude of how in one tiny moment the trajectory of their lives were forever altered.

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A few articles and videos I’ve read/watched and can recommend for those wanting to know more:

• The True Cost of the Chernobyl Disaster Has been Greater than it Seems, TIME
• The Animals of Chernobyl, NYT, video
• What will happen to Chernobyl in 100 Years?, MAD LAB, video
• Here’s why Chernobyl is still a massive problem today, video
• The Real Chernobyl Ep 1, (first of a series that compares the HBO miniseries to real life)
• And of course, the HBO Miniseries. I watched it before I went and will rewatch it now that I’ve returned.

P.S. Our guide informed us that Chernobyl reached 100,000 visitors (for the calendar year) just 2-3 weeks prior to our visit. I’m sure that’s in no small part due to the HBO Miniseries. I’m sure they will reach 100K/year moving forward. You can find all kinds of information about visiting the zone online. My two cents are that I was glad to visit in the off season and not be amongst huge crowds. Also, you are required to wear long sleeves and pants no matter when you visit. Therefore, it could be hot and more uncomfortable in the heat of summer–and it would also be more busy at that time. We traveled with Chernobyl Tour and I can recommend them without hesitation. The two day guided trip cost 249 USD.