Andrew Blackwell - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

On the seat beside me, the PADEKC was getting insistent. I apologized for the racket, feeling the same embarrassment as when your cellphone rings in a quiet theater. I tried to put the damn thing on vibrate, but all I could manage was to get lost in its impenetrable Russian menus. When we took the turnoff for Pripyat, it began to freak out in earnest. The reading ascended quickly from 50 micros through the 60s and the 80s, and into the low 100s. The beeping increased in pace, in a way I could only find vaguely alarming. Nikolai glanced back at me, unconcerned, but wondering what my little meter was making such a fuss about.

We were crossing through the Red Forest. Named for the color its trees had turned when they were killed off by a particularly bad dose of contamination, the Red Forest was cut down and buried in place, becoming what must be the world’s largest radioactive compost heap. Back in the briefing room, Dennis had warned me that we would experience our highest exposure while passing through this area, which had since been replanted with a grove of pine trees, themselves stunted by the radiation.

As we rounded a bend, Dennis again held his meter aloft outside the passenger window. It began chirping merrily. Meanwhile the PADEKC was going nuts. In Kiev, Leonid had told me the upper limit on the unit was 300 microroentgens, but it now spiked from the mid-100s directly to 361. The car filled with our detectors’ escalating beeps, which quickly coalesced into a single shrill tone that was painfully reminiscent of the flatlining heart monitor you hear on hospital TV shows.

Dennis’s meter topped out at 1,300 micros, about thirty times the background radiation in New York City. He twisted around in his seat to face me. “Yesterday it was up to 2,000,” he said. There was a hint of apology in his voice. Perhaps he was worried I might feel shortchanged for having received less than the maximum possible exposure from a Red Forest drive-by, as if I had come to Nepal to see Mount Everest, only to find it obscured by clouds.

Over a bridge lined with rusted street lamps and ruined guardrails, Nikolai slowed the car to weave between the potholes dotting the roadway. At the bottom of the bridge’s far slope, we reached another checkpoint. Dennis adroitly snatched the next leaf of paperwork out of the stack and tucked it into the waiting hand of the guard. The sign at the checkpoint read PRIPYAT.

Even more than the reactor itself, Pripyat is the centerpiece of any day trip to the Exclusion Zone. Before 1986, it was a city of nearly fifty thousand people, devoted almost entirely to running the four nuclear reactors that sat just down the road and to building the additional reactors that were to be added to the complex. At the time of the meltdown, Reactors Nos. 5 and 6 were nearing completion, and a further six reactors were planned, making the neighborhood a one-stop shop for the area’s nuclear energy needs.

It didn’t take long for the residents of Pripyat to realize there had been an accident. Anyone looking south from the upper stories of Pripyat’s tall apartment buildings could have seen smoke belching from the maw of the destroyed reactor building some two kilometers distant. What they didn’t know was that it was no ordinary fire.

The city was bathed in radiation, but the residents remained uninformed. They continued about their business for more than a day, while the government scrambled to contain the accident. Finally, at noon on April 27, nearly a day and a half after the explosion, the authorities announced their decision to evacuate the city.

You can say what you like about the Soviet government, which killed and exiled millions of its own people and repressed most of the rest. But you have to concede that when they put their minds to it, they really knew how to get a place evacuated. When at last the order was given, it took only hours for this city of fifty thousand people to become a ghost town. The evacuation was broadened over the following days to include more than a hundred thousand people. Ultimately, more than three hundred thousand were displaced.

Pripyat sat empty. In the months and years following the evacuation, it was looted and vandalized by people who were obviously unconcerned by the radioactive nature of their spoils, whether televisions for their own use or metal items to be sold as scrap. The evacuation and the looting turned Pripyat into what it is today: the world’s most genuinely post-apocalyptic city.

In spite of what you might have seen in the movies, though, things can actually be pretty nice after an apocalypse—if a bit scarce in terms of human beings. The road that led us into Pripyat from the south was lined with bushes speckled with small white blossoms, the air thick with the smell of flowers. The vista opened up as we reached the center of town, allowing a view of the buildings around us. Dennis and I clambered out in the middle of an intersection, and Nikolai motored off down a side road to find a nice spot to sit and drink the beer he’d bought earlier.

The day was hot and sunny. The ghostly city surrounded us, the buildings of downtown looming up from behind scattered poplar trees. Behind us rose a ten-story apartment block. Its pink and white plaster facade was falling off in patches, revealing the rough brickwork of the walls underneath. More apartment blocks stood along the road to the left, some of them crowned with large, Soviet hammer-and-sickle insignia that must once have lit up at night.

We walked toward the town plaza, following a path that had once been a sidewalk but was now a buckling concrete track invaded by weeds and grass. Dennis lit a cigarette and looked up as he took a long drag. A gentle breeze pushed a herd of little clouds across the sky. Birds flitted by.

The plaza was bordered on three sides by large buildings. To the right, a defunct neon sign announced the Hotel Polissia, seven stories of square, gaping windows. From where we stood, more than twenty years of looting and abandonment had not significantly worsened the stark, unforgiving aspect of the hotel’s architecture. A few hardy shrubs even peeked from among the freestanding letters of the roof sign. It’s amazing where things will grow when people stop all their weeding.

Between drags on his cigarette, Dennis answered my questions with the jaded economy of someone who had been to this spot a thousand times. “What’s that?” I said, pointing at the building to the left of the hotel.

“Culture palace,” he said.

“What’s a culture palace?”

“Discos.” Another drag. “Movies.”

To our left was a blocky building with a sign reading PECTOPAH. Using my nascent Cyrillic, I decoded this as RESTAURANT. I pointed to a low-slung gallery that jutted from its side.

“What was there?”

Dennis looked up and removed the cigarette from his mouth.

“Shops.”

The plaza where we stood was gradually surrendering itself to shrubs and moss. Vegetation spilled over its borders and crept along its seams. A set of low, crumbling stairs led up from the plaza’s lower level, purple wildflowers and a few tree saplings poking out from the cracks.

“Don’t step on the moss,” Dennis ordered as we walked up the mossy stairs from the mossy lower level to the mossy upper level.

“Why’s that?” I asked, and hoped he hadn’t seen the contorted tap dance of my reaction.

“The moss… concentrates the radiation,” he said, and tossed his cigarette butt on the ground. The same could have been said for the mushrooms he had freely admitted to gathering in the zone, but I didn’t bother to point it out.

I stopped to take a picture. Dennis dangled another cigarette from his mouth and posed on the concrete path, the pectopah in the distance. Behind his sunglasses, he could have been the bassist for a Ukrainian rock band. FOOTBALL, said the writing on his sleeveless black T-shirt. SYNTHETIC NATURE. He held up his detector for the camera to see. It read 120. But what did 120 microroentgens mean on a sunny day? More than a little. Less than a lot. Panic in Kiev.