So much in this article including good photos of the disaster area. What made the greatest impression on me was the photo of all the gas masks on the floor as people discarded them, when they realized they were useless. I can only imagine the horror of such a situation. The area affected most by the Chernobyl disaster is as the article says, like a time capsule.
“In Northern Ukraine and parts of Belarus, if you’re alone on a road, there’s a chance a wild boar will get you. If the boar doesn’t get you there’s a chance the wolves will take you and, if the wolves don’t take you, the bears can get you,” Maxwell said.
“One day I was wandering around Pripyat where the population was once 50,000. That day, there were only three people — myself, my driver and my guide. I was going into abandoned apartment buildings and there was a real fear of turning a corner and coming across a wolf or a bear and surprising it.”
“It’s an interesting primal experience because you suddenly feel what your deepest ancestors would have felt; the sense you could be taken by a scary animal at any point. But you’re in such a modern environment of concrete and supermarkets and abandoned pianos.
“It’s a real clash of time periods. You get a sense of time travel when you’re in the exclusion zone.”
“Due to remediation of large areas of the CEZ in the 1990s, there are entire regions where the background radiation is negligibly higher than that of Sydney. The same goes for Fukushima Prefecture in Japan.”
“Of course, if you go strolling into the heart of either reactor vessel you’ll fry yourself and die. But the actual lived experience of the Chernobyl disaster, I would argue, has more to do with psychological disaster than it does radiological disaster.
“The most harrowing aspect of working in fields of trauma like Chernobyl is the sense of life interrupted and the forced relocation of the population.
“That is the true horror of Chernobyl.””
Source:
www.news.com.au/technology/envir…4524b54e67