Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
changed 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 addition-
al 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 kilo-
meters 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 contin-
ued 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 mil-
lions 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 hun-
dred 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 evacu-
ation 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
