By Helen Matthews
“Don’t step on the
moss. It soaks up radioactivity” Nikolai
warned us, using his Geiger counter to demonstrate the effect. It beeped
obediently. As our local guide in the
Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, his job was to keep us safe from radiation. Much of
the zone is now perfectly safe to visit.
Our radiation exposure at the end of our two-day trip was less than that
of a 5-hour flight. There are however
‘hotspots’ where radiation is far higher, so following Nikolai’s advice was
essential.
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| Abandoned fairground in Pripyat |
His attitude to other
health and safety issues was, by UK standards, refreshingly relaxed. We picked our way through the abandoned town
of Pripyat over broken glass and up crumbling stairways. So what if the floor
had a hole with a tree growing through it – the other side of the room was
fine.
“I had a couple of
visitors fall through the stage, so we don’t go in here anymore” Nikolai
observed casually as we looked into what had once been the auditorium of a
theatre.
Exploring Pripyat was
rather like stepping into episode one of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi serial. Established
in 1970 as a home for the workers at the Chernobyl nuclear power complex, with
modern amenities and leisure facilities, it is just over thirty years since the
catastrophic explosion in reactor no. 4 on 26 April 1986 that led to the town’s
evacuation. The new Ferris wheel in the amusement park had been due to open
just a few days later. Now completely abandoned, nature is well on the way to
reclaiming Pripyat. Shops, apartment
buildings and leisure facilities are slowly decaying. Every year there is less
to see.
The exclusion zone is
not entirely deserted. There are still workers at the power station. These days
they are installing the new containment shield which replaces the concrete
sarcophagus on reactor no. 4. The
workers live in the town of Chernobyl itself, which lies within the 30 k.m.
containment zone but unlike Pripyat, is outside the 10 k.m. inner zone. They
work a shift pattern, typically 2 weeks on, and two weeks off, spent outside
the zone. Also in Chernobyl are fire fighters who are on constant guard against
forest fires. There is even a hotel,
built for visiting scientists, where we were able to stay the night.
There are lots of
feral dogs. Most, but not all, had tags
in their ears showing that they had been neutered during a recent
exercise. The dogs tended to congregate
around the power station canteen, where workers (and visitors) smuggle them
food, despite the notices to the contrary. They were friendly but we were
advised not to pet them, in case they had been rolling in a radioactive
hotspot. In Pripyat, we even met a tame fox.
He had been found with a damaged leg and nursed by checkpoint guards.
The river by the power station is full of giant catfish. Their size is down to
being fed by visitors rather than a radioactive mutation.
Some of the original local
inhabitants, known as settlers, have moved back to their villages. They generally live well into their
eighties. We met one of them, called
Ivan. He said that he had moved in 1988
as the town to which he had been evacuated had more radioactivity and poorer
housing. His village was in a clean area
of the zone and the house, which he had built himself was free from draughts.
He grows all his own vegetables and chops his own wood and certainly looks well
enough on it.
Others were not so
lucky. All of the firefighters who
responded as soon as the reactor fire was noticed died from radiation within a
couple of weeks, as were the doctors and nurses at the Moscow hospital where
they were treated. There is a monument to these first responders outside the
Chernobyl fire station, funded by their relatives. Officially it doesn’t exist
as they did not complete the necessary paperwork.
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| Clean-up robots |
Attempts were made to
use robots in the subsequent clean-up operation. The Japanese robots worked longer than the
Soviet one, based on the chassis of a Moon buggy which lasted a mere 30 minutes,
but none of them operated for long before the radiation fried their
circuits. The solution was to use
‘bio-robots’ – humans wearing rudimentary radiation protection who each were
able to work for just a couple of minutes shovelling debris. The remains of the mechanical robots are now
on display in Chernobyl. The fate of the
bio-robots is not fully recorded.
It was a strange trip.
It was terrible to think of the fate of those who were caught up in the
horrific events, but in some ways encouraging to see the resilience of the
natural world in claiming its own.
