The Chernobyl nuclear accident was, according to many experts, the greatest ecological catastrophe in human history. The radioactive wave affected 13 countries and contaminated an area of 160,000 square kilometers. It all happened on April 25, 1986 when one of the nuclear power plant’s four reactors blew up after the core overheated while tests were being carried out. Pripyat, the city where the facility workers lived, was evacuated the next day.
38 years have passed and Pripyat remains a ghost town, completely uninhabited, with radiation levels that will not return to normal for thousands of years. It had 50,000 inhabitants at the time of being abandoned by decision of the Soviet Politburo, whose general secretary was Mikhail Gorbachev. The communist leader took more than 24 hours to react because the information that initially reached him minimized the impact of the accident.
Pripyat was planned in 1970 by Soviet architects who wanted to build a model city in the shadow of the power plant. It was 2.7 kilometers from Chernobyl, in northern Ukrainea, very close to the border with Belarus. The average of its inhabitants was 30 years old in 1975 when almost 1,000 children were born.
Today it is impossible to access Pripyat because the Army has established a security cordon of 30 kilometers in radius. Only experts and some journalists can visit ground zero of the disaster. What remains is the skeleton of a city that had to be hastily abandoned. By late afternoon on April 26, the day after the accident, there was no one left. Several thousand buses evacuated the entire population in a few hours. The residents of Pripyat and the surrounding towns, in total, about 120,000 people, they had to leave the place.
Although there are signs of vandalization by some thieves who managed to avoid the fence, it is still possible to enter the homes that preserve the furniture and belongings of their former inhabitants. The buildings no longer have glass, the rains have brought down the roofs, the streets are full of holes, the weather has taken its toll on their infrastructure.
Information from European television networks alerted the Kremlin of the magnitude of the catastrophe
The images show its old and grandiose Palace of Culture, its heated swimming pool, the restaurant, a sports center, schools, administrative buildings and its hospital, where hundreds of those affected were taken. About 50 plant workers died due to the impact of radiation in the following days. It is not yet possible to make an exact count of the victims, but it is estimated that in the following two decades several thousand could have died from cancer caused by radiation.
The radioactivity levels during the accident exceeded those of the Hiroshima atomic bomb by 500 times, which gives an idea of the devastation. The Soviet authorities built a sarcophagus to seal the plant, which, years later, was reinforced. Life has gradually returned to Pripyat, where dogs, foxes and some wild animals survive without human presence. The roses planted half a century ago, which were the emblem of the city, still bloom. Its parks, invaded by vegetation, evoke that city that symbolized the industrial progress of Soviet communism in the 70s, which boasted of having the most advanced nuclear technology in the world. Pripyat is today a silent warning of the risks of uncontrolled progress.
#sign #catastrophe
