Chernobyl And The Abandoned Town Of Pripyat (120 Photos)

Chernobyl And Pripyat

In the early hours of 26 April 1986, one of four nuclear reactors at the Chernobyl power station near the town of Pripyat, Ukraine, exploded.

Forty hours later, the residents of Pripyat were ordered to evacuate. By that time, many of them had suffered varying degrees of extreme radioactive poisoning.

In keeping with a long tradition of Soviet justice, they imprisoned all the people who worked on that shift – regardless of their guilt. The man who tried to stop the chain reaction in a last desperate attempt to avoid the meltdown was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He died 3 weeks later.

Pripyat was founded in 1970 and located 4km north of the reactor. It was home to 48,000 people at the time of the disaster and now stands desolate although guided tours are available.

Chernobyl city is located 14.5km northwest of the power plant. Prior to its evacuation, the city was inhabited by roughly 14,000 residents.

Today it’s mostly uninhabited, a small number of people reside in houses marked with signs stating that the “Owner of this house lives here”. Workers on watch and administrative personnel of the Zone of Alienation are stationed in the city on a long term basis.

How many people died of radiation? No one knows – not even approximately. The official casualty reports range from 300 to 300,000 and many unofficial sources put the toll at over 400,000.

Around 3.500 people either refused to leave or returned to their villages after the meltdown in 1986. They eat food from their own gardens, drink the milk of their cows and claim that they are healthy….. but estimates suggest only 300 have survived this long.

The gallery below shows images from the power plant, Chernobyl, the ghost town of Pripyat, surrounding villages and several locations in nearby Belarus.

Reports suggest around 70% of the radiation from the reactor was blown over Belarus and as you will see, many of the houses are constructed from wood which absorbs radiation like a sponge.

The photographs were taken by various visitors to the area over the past 20 years who were issued special permission to enter the exclusion zone.