09.30
“The Zone is not a territory, but on the contrary, a trial, which one either passes or fails. Everything depends on self-dignity, on how far one is able to distinguish between the important and the transitory.”
- Andrej Tarkovskij, STALKER
Madventures started the Russian journey driving to Ukraine.
In Ukrainian language “Chorno” means “black” and “byl” means “pain.” The word put together – Chernobyl – means Wormwood. In the bible, the Book of Revelations speaks about a falling star, which made the waters bitter and killed many men.
That star was named Wormwood.
Growing up in Finland, right next to the Soviet Union, Chernobyl disaster was something that couldn’t be dismissed. This wasn’t just another headline you could sweep under the carpet to make room for the next catastrophe. It wasn’t your regular apocalypse.
For once, we were living right next door to hell, waiting for that radiation cloud to rain some death on us all.
This was back in 1986, when the nuclear war seemed like an actual possibility. Yes, kids, there were times like that back when dinosaurs walked the earth. How funny then, that the radioactivity did not come from the bomb, but from faulty engineering and human lapse of judgment. Well, not funny hah-hah funny, but you get the point.
But even with that personal point of view to what happened back then, it was the visit to the actual power plant and the ghost town of Pripyat all these years later that really brought home the magnitude of the incident.
Picture the street where you live.
Go ahead, take that mental snapshot.
Now start toying with the image. Apply some cracks in the pavement. Trees growing through the asphalt, nature taking over the abandoned buildings, rusty husks of cars left behind by their owners. No people on sight. Wild animals run the alleyways. A deer walks through the unhinged front door of the house across the street.
Everywhere, flora and fauna have reclaimed the spot of land that man once tried to take over with concrete and steel, in vain.
This is your home and you will never return.
For the 50 000 souls who used to call the town of Pripyat their home, the image is reality.
The population left in a hurry, many leaving their personal belongings behind. Radioactivity tends to do that to a person.
Explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant reactor number four made sure they will never return, not if they value their life. Quite unbelievably, some of the older residents of Chernobyl exclusion zone have gone back to the land of their roots, now tainted by the poisonous gamma rays. They drink the water, farm the land, eat the berries and live with the consequences.
That’s what it means to call a place home.
Two workers died in the actual meltdown of the reactor, 28 firemen succumbed to the acute radiation sickness during the first three months following the accident. Thirty is still the official death toll given by the authorities. In reality, no one really knows the number of fatalities caused by the radiation released into the atmosphere and the subsequent fallout.
The liquidator groups, those sent to clean up the mess, were dealt the most raw deal. In this group of 600 000, the effects of the fatal subatomic particles endure to the present day and in future generations.
Radioactive iodine 131 effectively targets the thyroid. Thousands of people who were infants at the time of the disaster have contracted the thyroid cancer as a result of the burning reactor’s large releases of the radioiodine.
In the villages along the rivers that flow through contaminated lands, many of the young suffer from brain tumours. Newborn babies with assorted anomalies develop mental handicaps when – or if – they grow older. Some of the kids stop growing at a very young age and there has even been cases reported where adult persons’ skeletons and bodies incomprehensibly started to shrink.
These are the children of Chernobyl.
The question remains – could many tragedies have been prevented, if the evacuation had started immediately after the explosion, instead of authorities attempting to conceal the nature of the disaster and stalling for time for more than 24 hours?
R & T
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