Lost Places

After visit on the former over-the-horizon radar station "Chernobyl-2", we go in (again former) Pripyat cargo port. I was in this place and photographed majestic pelican-like port cranes many times. And also Evgenie Samoilov, participant of elimination of the consequences of the accident - 86 and simply a good person, has written four years ago remarkable memoirs of the work in Pripyat port after failure. On the way to port we have decided to stop off near a tiny cemetery of homestead Pidlisnyj. This homestead for a long time was a source of mess and Zone riddles. Old residents do not remember such homestead, on maps is not present at all, but on its place quite safely exists PZRO (point of radioactive waste disposal) "Podlesnoe" - the boring concreted platform with boxes for RAW (radioactive waste) with activity from 5 to 250 R/h.

We did not have any specific plans and aims for this trip. We have decided that we will look according to circumstances. I have noticed that the most interesting and productive trips turn out then when you do not build any grandiose plans, and operate on intuition.

7.30 AM We leave Kyiv. This week was hot. Weather forecasters assert that these days even the temperature record keeping 64 years has been broken! Early morning, but the sun is rather hot and the conditioner in the car works at full capacity. Folk in shorts and sandals lazy creeps on a beach, and we in the closed clothes (relentless NRB - Norms of radiating safety) go to the Chornobyl Zone.

Pripyat Hospital MSCh-126 (medico-sanitary unit). It is a huge complex occupying the most part of the first microdistrict of a city. Anyone, who has ever visited Pripyat, saw the main building of the MSCh in the street Druzhby Narodov (Friendship of the People street) with huge letters on a roof: "Здоров'я народу - багатство країни" (health of a people - riches of the country). Here on April, 26th, 1986 ambulance cars delivered the first victims: firemen and personnel of the ChNPP. Some of them had time to receive on some deadly doses of an external and internal irradiation, beta skin burns. After such do not survive... They still stood on the feet, still tried to joke, but days and even hours of their life have already been counted and all that the medicine could do – just to try to ease their death.    

Hostels of the city Pripyat, though stay in the ruined condition (as a result of evacuation, attempts of the subsequent deactivation, disinfection, deratization and simply usual marauding), nevertheless keep peculiar atmosphere of the Soviet time habitation. In Pripyat hostels, as it seems to me, on small and insignificant “debris” of that time, it is possible to feel 80th years of the last century. The most part of hostels of Pripyat is in 1 microdistrict. Its the nearest to ChNPP, the very first area of a new city on river bank of Pripyat. Builders of a city and personnel of ChNPP here received their first habitation, moved from cabin-trailers of settlement Lesnoy near railway station Janiv.