Chernobyl and Pripyat

Day Four

Basements

We woke up on day four somewhat tired, but eager for the day. We had already seen most of the public places in town where the best traces of the city are, so it was an "open day" where we just kind of wandered around. Arek wanted to explore a bit, so we let him trust his gut and just guide us around.

He wanted to go to the most radioactive places in Pripyat. We agreed.

The two most radioactive places he knew of are in the basements of the hospital and the electronics plant. The levels were still supposedly safe for (very!) short-term exposure, but we donned particle masks to keep whatever airborne radiation that may be present out of our systems. Since there was only one mask, we had to alternate and take turns venturing into the darkness.

The first stop was the Jupiter Electronics plant basement, where there is a sealed box of unknown substance that absolutely emanates radiation. We ventured together down to the basement, but when we all entered a small room with a fenced off area, we stopped. I didn't want to go past the fence, but Arek pulled down a side of it and went forth into the dark corner of the basement.

What is in the box, I have no idea. Nobody does. Arek wouldn't tell me just how high the radiation levels were on his calibrated Geiger counter as he handled the box, but I'm guessing there were damn near close to a milli-Sievert per hour. I didn't get any closer than about 20 feet away from the box.

I was truly humbled, and hope to have the option of having children some day, so I didn't get any closer. We had three Geiger counters between the four of us, and they were all beeping their highest level of alarm - the one that means "LEAVE NOW WHEREVER YOU ARE". I stayed on the safe side of the chain-link fence, assuming it was put up for a very good reason.

The mystery of what's in the box is still there, and I think of it often. It's sometimes better to not know.

The next basement was in the hospital.

We gathered outside the hospital and Arek gave me the particle mask. He gave me directions to get to the next location, telling me I had to go alone into the unknown by myself, with flashlight in hand to cut the darkness.

I followed the vague directions, Geiger counter in hand, and slowed down as the alarm in my hand started going off. I slowly approached the target: a pile of clothing on the floor.

Immediately after the explosion, the first responders were the folks at the plant itself, then the firefighters who were called to put out the fire still burning in the reactor. A firefighter that first responded was later sent to the hospital, where he was never able to recover from his exposure. He died in the hospital. For whatever reason, his uniform and boots were never disposed of properly, and are still laying in the hospital basement, two decades after the accident, to be radioactive for the next 35,000 years or so.

Piano Shop

Since Kim can play the piano, we decided to swing by and pick her out a new piano. Unfortunately the shop had been closed for 26 years, so we couldn't find anything that could quite fit her needs.

Graveyard

Our last stop in Pripyat, somewhat fittingly, was the graveyard. It's said that some of the workers and first responders are buried in lead caskets to keep the radiation in, but they are not found in the Pripyat graveyard, they are another lost Soviet secret.

In Pripyat, we found a lot of graves from folks who had died both before and very soon after the explosion. The interesting thing about this particular graveyard is that it was never "cleaned" of the radiation - that is the cleanup crews never sprayed foam or dug up the top layer of soil (for obvious reasons). The radiation levels even standing up off the ground were significantly higher than background.

Our guide told us we had 15 minutes to wander, then we must get back to the truck at once to get further past the harmful levels of radiation.

Village Hunting

As we didn't have much else planned for the day, we decided to wander the area around Pripyat. We heard a rumor of a few older couples that lived outside the city limits despite the rest of the town being abandoned, so we thought it'd be fun to visit them.

We drove down a back road, twisting and turning, turning around, following other roads. Finally we came to where we wanted to be, another security check point that was protecting an area of radiation as well as the handful of residences still in use.

Our Ukrainian escort, Sergey took point. He got out of the truck and approached the guards, who were rather apprehensive of our being there. He said that we had all the proper paperwork to continue, but the guards disagreed.

Nothing a little vodka couldn't fix. We watched on as they all took shots and mingled a bit more, finally agreeing that yes, our blank pieces of paper did give us authority to continue past the gate. Unfortunately, however, it was a rare family visitation day so it was incredibly bad timing on our part so could we come back tomorrow?

Of course we couldn't. We turned around and continued on our way.

Duga3 - Russian Woodpecker

Our last stop led me to climb again, though not as high as I wanted.

The Russian Woodpecker was a high frequency radio array used to detect missile launches from anywhere in the world. In theory, they could blast a massive high frequency radio signal (on the order of megawatts) with a special encoding and listen for the return of the signal after it's gone around the world. It was a viable detection mechanism, but since the signal was heard around the world it was trivial for ham radio operators to pinpoint the exact location of the device. It was so powerful that when it was radiating, people the world over would hear a 100hz "tapping" noise on phones and radios, hence the name: The Russian Woodpecker.

It is apparently the site of national secrets, still, so we were unable to approach the array itself. As a consolation, I climbed a 100-foot tower nearby to get a better view.

After the DUGA-3, we headed back the way we came, further from the Exclusion Zone and the abandonment and the radiation. Pripyat, the once-beacon town for Soviet excellence has been reduced to a shell of its former self, with buildings collapsing and nature reclaiming the land.

The new sarcophagus that will be slid in to place sometime in 2015 will hopefully contain the deadly radiation in ractor 4 for another two hundred years or more, but the radiation it's masking will remain deadly for tens of thousands of years more. Pripyat will likely never be inhabited again.

Arek drove us back to Kiev, where we stayed at a comparably-luxurious apartment for another few days, reflecting on our trip to the Exclusion Zone. It truly was a trip that I will remember for a lifetime.

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