Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Day 1: Pripyat

Wow.

We woke up early, were picked up by the tour operators, and drove off to the exclusion zone.  We switched tour guides three times within four hours...  We rode to the zone with Macksim, who lived in Kiev at the time of the accident.  It was interesting listening to his story of all of the uncertainty surrounding the situation.  We arrived at the 30km checkpoint, were granted admittance, and drove to the Chernobyl Interinform headquarters in the city of Chernobyl.  In case you didn't know, there is actually a city called Chernobyl in the zone, although it is not the abandoned city - that is Pripyat.  We checked into our gated hotel and switched tour guides for the last time and wound up with Maksim #2.  We drove through the 10km checkpoint and towards the ChNPP facility.  We stoppped outside reactor #4 and took the standard pictures.  Everyone has the same pictures because you are not allowed to photograph in any other direction there.

Off we went to Pripyat through another checkpoint.  We stopped first at the Pripyat hospital.  This thing was massive, and extremely moist.  There wasn't anything too interesting there, pretty much what I expected from all of the pictures.  It is obvious in some rooms that people moved objects to create scenes for pictures that didn't actually exist :-(.  Next we walked through the grass (!) to the city morgue (Maksim had never been there before, so it was a trip for him too).  We found the gas crematorium chamber...  As we stepped outside, Carl was scanning the ground someplace and was ecstatic to find a 'hot' spot.  Maksim said that we had better go as it was probably not safe to stay there long.

Next we headed to the Jupiter Plant, a metal factory of some sorts...  Mike and I walked around the plant and into various rooms, finding all sorts of electrical equipment.  We met up with Carl, Ed, and Maksim and proceeded to the basement.  This was the second surprise for Maksim (he had never been there and was previously told there were no bomb shelters in Pripyat), as we found a bomb shelter underneath the factory.  So here we are, five guys, four cameras, and one flashlight, walking around a pitch black bomb shelter.  Judging by the equipment there, it appears that it may have been intended to be a bomb shelter, but that other 'experiments' were carried out there instead...  Although the place was dark, scary-movie kind of creepy, moldy and disgusting, there was no radiation contamination there.

After we headed to the police station.  Nothing too exciting here, except for a highly radioactive shoe outside.  Across the street was an automobile workshop, and near the police station was a vehicle dump site.  Again, leave it to Carl with his geiger counter to find the hottest spot in the place.  As a worker for the Interinform, Maksim has been told about all of the really hot spots in the city, however he said that he never knew about the one Carl found.

Last stop of the day was a kindergarten.  In order to get there, we had to walk about 200 feet into the forest...  So typical one-day tours give you dosimeters and you're only allowed to walk on the pavement because once you walk off of it, the radiation levels jump high (not lethal, but high enough that you don't want to spend all day there).  Needless to say, it was slightly unnerving walking through it.  The kindergarten building is starting to become one with the forest around it with trees growing in it.  Mike and I ventured off into various classrooms and realized that there weren't too many differences between American and Russian (USSR) kindergartens, despite the fact that Americans believe that everything here is completely different...  It should be no surprise now that Carl found the hot spot there in one of the gutters, which was apparently the hottest place he had found all day (not lethal, but potentially close).

It's still hard to imagine what it was like being here when the accident took place... Being forced to evacuate the city, and imagining all the turmoil.  No one knew the actual danger of the disaster.  People were told that they were being evacuated for three days and would return.  No one could see the danger that had fallen on their city, their lives.  Yet I'm standing in an irradiated city and cannot see the danger that is lurking around me.  Have I gotten close to something radioactively 'hot' today?  Probably, but I just didn't know about it, like all fourty thousand inhabitants.

What have I learned today?
1. Mosquitoes suck
2. The city really isn't that 'creepy', I think a lot of it is psychological
3. Stay away from Carl, but note his location while he's hunting for radioactivite hot spots in an irradiated city.