Chapter 7

RADIATION

My alarm interrupts an unbroken eight-hour sleep. Feels more like two. Staggering out of bed, I gather my discarded clothes from the floor, rub the sleep from my eyes, then amble through to our cramped kitchen for a wake-up mug of sweet tea. We head out early; today we explore Pripyat.

I deliberately pack light when travelling. It’s a practical decision, I don’t want to waste time worrying about suitcases going missing, nor dragging unnecessary weight around with me. Danny, for example, brought an armful of huge photography books with him. Two sets of clothes, a toothbrush and plenty of deodorant will suffice if I’m only away for a couple of days. I concede that it’s a little unpleasant, but I hate carrying more than one bag, the only exception being my tripod in its case. Naturally, I counter this by taking far too much superfluous camera gear, and lenses weigh more than socks! More lenses than I’ll ever use; more batteries than my numerous memory cards could make use of; battery chargers for my phone, camera and laptop; card readers (two, in case one breaks); cables for everything under the sun (just in case both card readers break); lens hoods; a wide variety of cleaning utensils; tripod attachment for my phone (for video recording - I’ve never used it), and a menagerie of other random bits and pieces. The predictable result is that the weight and space saved by my lack of clothing is more than compensated for, both in weight and bulk, by a ludicrous, tangled mass of camera equipment. I find myself most regretting this philosophy on long, relentless days with few breaks - days like this one.

I’ll need as much energy as I can get, so I devour my plate of chicken, cucumber and tomato with all the fervour of a sprinter at the Olympics. After gathering our gear and filing out onto the damp street, we’re greeted by a spectacular sunrise - the nicest I’ve seen for months. Our entire group assembles to watch red bleed across a vivid blue sky, bringing life to the day and splashing slivers of light on nearby puddles and window panes. Like yesterday, tired-looking men and women drift towards the train station in almost absolute silence. It’s like a funeral procession, even conversation between ourselves is scant; perhaps everyone feels more serious after the previous 24 hours. I assume the train travels here straight from Chernigov, some 40km due east of Slavutych. It arrives at the platform empty, save for the driver, so it must not stop at any other town or village along the way. We board - I stand - and are soon rattling past miles and miles of cold, quiet swamps and marshland in every direction. It’s October, so no flowers are in bloom, but the landscape beyond my condensation-smeared window is so bleak I can’t imagine bright colours ever trespassing here. Despite this, the land of northern Ukraine is some of the most fertile in Europe, so the view must look very different during spring.

Upon our arrival, we endure a bumpy bus ride to our first stop of the day: a barren, muddy waste-burial ground 10km east-southeast of the plant, called Buriakivka. It was the principal site used by Liquidators to bury low-level radioactive waste in 1986, such as buildings, household items and an assortment of vehicles. There are 30 covered ditches in two rows of 15, each roughly 150x50 meters in size and containing 22,000m³ of material.227 Only one remains empty, the rest appear as grassy mounds in the landscape, and the vehicle graveyard in the site’s southeast corner is where I now find myself. “We only stop five minutes here, this area is very radioactive,” Marek announces through our translator, his sombre face staring at each of us. “When I say five minutes, I mean five minutes. Touch nothing. When I shout ‘time up’, you run - not walk - back to the bus.”

My heart sinks. It looks like there are hundreds of vehicles here, all lined up in organised rows across a vast open space. Where do I even start? First, I spot the armoured personnel carriers that ferried soldiers around Chernobyl, of the same type used by the chemical troops. Next, the bulldozers I’ve seen in documentaries and Igor Kostin’s photos that dug up villages in the exclusion zone - too contaminated to save. I race around without pausing to consider composition in my photos, nor even really looking at my subjects for more than a few seconds. I can spend all the time in the world studying them later. Snap, run, snap, run, snap. Endless nondescript, olive-drab trucks; the occasional gutted bus; tankers; trailers; sections of airframes; fire engines, their red paint almost indistinguishable from the rust. How many of their crews are still breathing?

Surprise! I’m ecstatic to discover part of an STR-1 remote-controlled Moon vehicle, used to push graphite and nuclear fuel off the roof of Unit 4, nestled in between two trucks. It’s smaller than I expected, with its white/silver paint and chunky metal wheels standing out among the greens, browns and deflated tyres. I stop to take a proper look. When I point it out to a nearby photographer, he stares at me, confused. He doesn’t understand its significance and presumably doesn’t even know what he’s looking at - a pile of junk. There’s something almost mythical to me about that roof, it sounds like a legend told around campfires. The radiation was so high that even this robot - designed for use in space, the harshest environment known to man - succumbed, followed by a desperate sacrifice when humans replaced it. Too soon, time’s up, and I haven’t even covered half of the vehicles here. Some distance from me, I can see pieces of helicopters squeezed among other weird and wonderful pieces of history, but there’s no time to photograph them. One day.

Danny, Katie, Dawid and I are all seasoned urban explorers, with years of experience. I have snuck into and photographed abandoned hospitals, schools, mansions, hotels, castles, various types of mills, power stations, train stations above and below ground, distilleries, churches, entire villages, and - my personal favourite - a former Top Secret, Cold War jet engine testing facility named the National Gas Turbine Establishment (NGTE) Pyestock, hidden within a pine wood west of London. Even with all that experience, I have never been anywhere close to the scale of Pripyat.

Today we have six hours in the city. It’s obvious that, as with all of the best places, there’s far too much to see and do, and far too much ground to cover in the time available to us. While Pripyat is small compared to most cities, both in population and geography, it’s still too expansive for a small group to see everything on foot in a day. Deciding ahead of time where to spend our six valuable hours was essential. With this in mind, my new friends and I sat down together the previous night over a round of tea, to plan which buildings we’d visit today. We have devised an ambitious schedule using the photography books from Danny’s suitcase as a reference for what looked most interesting. We discovered afterwards that we were the only ones to take this approach, and saw by far the most out of our group. The rest just wandered aimlessly; some even spent the entire day in a single building.

Hospital Number 126 is the only high-value target southeast of our drop-off point, and the building furthest from the bus, so we agreed to go there first to get it out of the way. We pass countless high-rise residential buildings, brightly-coloured wall murals and unusual structures I can’t identify. Buildings I’d ordinarily spend an entire day inside are ignored altogether in favour of more promising targets. The first stricken operators and firemen were brought to this hospital on the night of the accident. Akimov, Toptunov, Dyatlov, Perevozchenko, Pravik. Each of them spent time here. I wish I knew which ward they were admitted to, or if any of their medical records remain amongst the thousands of papers scattered in every room. Sadly, I wouldn’t recognise their names in Cyrillic even if I saw them.

As I approach the building, its sandy brown, tiled exterior partially camouflaged by the trees’ golden leaves, I spy a rusting lithotomy stirrup-chair sitting alone by the entrance. I always find myself wondering how these things ended up where they are. Someone, at some point during the last 25 years, has decided to drag that chair out of a room, down a corridor, through the main lobby, down the steps beyond the doors and dump it here. Why would anybody do that? The firemen’s helmets, clothes and boots - still radioactive to this day - are discarded in the pitch black basement, but I don’t go down to see them. The damp, claustrophobic space is like a maze, and the most contaminated spot in the city. Even with my torch I’d probably get lost, and the risk of inhaling poisonous dust - far more harmful than skin exposure - is high. As with everything in Pripyat, the hospital building has been looted countless times by selfish visitors over the years. At first, thieves bribed or dodged the soldiers to steal valuable items left behind after the evacuation, though some of them later paid the price when their loot was dangerously radioactive. For the last decade or so, many explorers visiting the area out of curiosity have also, sadly, been stealing trinkets that interest them. Sometimes to sell (unforgivable), other times for safeguarding. I understand the temptation. When a piece of history is discarded on the ground, your first instinct is to pick it up and save it, but you must remind yourself that it isn’t yours to take. It’s all part of the Chernobyl story - its place is where it lies.

I skip the ground floor and climb the concrete stairwell straight to the top, reasoning it’ll probably be a little less desecrated than the lower levels. No such luck, the top floor is wrecked too; unsurprising after such a long time. Broken chairs, doors, boxes, strip lights, cupboards and bed frames lie all around. Most wards are bare bones and peeling paint - nothing but empty rooms, thick with dust. Some, however, reveal treasures. Sealed, finger-sized vials on dusty glass shelving, somehow still contain a clear liquid. Rooms packed full of books, hand-written patient records and administrative paperwork. An operating table, complete with the classic circular overhead surgical lamp. A wall panel with full-colour illustrated drawings demonstrates how to craft a splint.

As at Buriakivka earlier this morning, our crushing time limit is a constant weight on my shoulders - I know I can’t stop to appreciate the things I see, forcing me to rush around too fast to absorb anything. Barely any of my photographs are being composed in any meaningful way, this is almost purely documentary - the sights and sounds come first, the images a distant second. I feel like I’m doing an injustice to the men and women who suffered here by running around the place like a child, trying to see as much as I can before time forces my hand. Continuing a frustrating pattern that’s to be repeated throughout the day, I leave the hospital completely unsatisfied with my photographs.

Next, we’re making our way to the music school via the cinema. By that time, we’ll be close to the hotel which forms part of a cluster of highlights in the centre of town, along with the Palace of Culture (aka the Cultural Centre), the famous ferris wheel and the dodgems. Once we’ve spent our allotted time with all of that we’ll head towards a kindergarten, via another medical centre, then onto the swimming pool. To cap the day, we’ll pay a visit to the main high school before returning to our starting point. A lot of ground to cover in 6 hours and, tragically, there are a lot of very promising buildings - the Jupiter factory, in particular - that we just don’t have enough time for.

To commemorate this occasion, Danny has the idea of using our photographs as the basis for a commemorative 25th anniversary photographic book on the legacy of Chernobyl, which is a wonderful idea. True to his word, the book has since been published.

Walking through Pripyat is an otherworldly experience. It’s the tail end of autumn and fallen leaves lie everywhere, like a blanket of gold spread across the tarmac. As we walk down cracked paths narrowed by overgrowth, all I see are varying shades of orangey yellow; pavements and buildings clouded by a whiskey colour serve as a constant reminder of the encroaching winter. It’s so peaceful, the only sounds are the wind whispering to wrinkled tree leaves that it’s their turn to give up and fall, the faint but ever-present tolling of the bell - the distant pile driver - and my own footsteps. It all fills me with an almost unique, unsettling feeling that’s impossible to describe, as if I’m dreaming or walking through an enclosed movie set. Everywhere I turn the illusion persists, only this isn’t fake and I am not dreaming - I really am in a dead city. Part of me half expects to turn a corner and discover the buildings are simple wooden facades, with bored film crews loitering just out of view, waiting to be called to set.

I say almost unique because I’ve experienced this feeling one other time, in the pitch black, subterranean testing chamber of ‘Cell 3’ at Pyestock. This is the facility where the engines for Concord and Britain’s Royal Air Force and Navy were developed and tested. When you first enter the building above ground, Cell 3 appears to be a rather empty, inconspicuous building. About 7 meters wide by 30 or 40 long, tall windows stretch from floor to ceiling, walkways hang high up on the walls, a few railings stand in the centre of an unoccupied floor. Compared to everything else at Pyestock, it seems dull. When you approach those railings, however, you realise they’re surrounding a pit buried in the floor, in which sits a massive cylinder lying on its side and reaching out of sight in either direction. A section of this cylinder is missing from the upper face, but there’s no obvious route down. You find a way - in my case, descending a rickety, 60-year-old wooden ladder, graciously left off to one side by previous explorers - and discover yourself standing inside the great machine.

At one end of Cell 3 are 10 grilled vents in a ring around a large central exhaust, which reaches through the machine to where a jet turbine would have been mounted. On the other side is an impressive, industrial-looking sliding door. It’s not original, closer inspection reveals that the door is made from wood. This place was used as the villain’s lair location for the unremarkable 2005 action-adventure film Sahara, starring Matthew McConaughey. Behind the door you crouch-walk for 15 meters down a narrow cylindrical tunnel until you enter the rear of Cell 3. This is where I felt like I was dreaming; the space is almost impossible to describe. The end of the tunnel expands into a drum shape until it has a diameter of 5 or 6 meters, the remains of unidentifiable machinery are attached all around its scorched, torch-lit surface. The bottom is flooded with a coppery, cloudy liquid, with miscellaneous debris on the surface making it seem deeper than it probably is. Detached ends of dozens of pipes reach around a central, circular, ribbed thing mounted on the wall opposite you - a heat sink of some kind, perhaps - above and behind which you can just make out a large, black hole in the ceiling. It reminds me of the subterranean tunnels the Nebuchadnezzar traverses in The Matrix.

While I won’t have time to see anywhere near all of them, Pripyat had all the facilities you would expect of a modest-sized city. In addition to the aforementioned hospital and its nearby clinics, there were 15 kindergartens, 5 schools, a vocational school/college and a school of music and the arts for the children, with 1 expansive park and 35 smaller playgrounds for them to play in. Further entertainment was found at any of the city’s 10 gyms; 3 swimming pools; 10 shooting ranges; 2 stadiums; 4 libraries and a cinema, or by reading Pripyat’s own newspaper. Retail came in the form of 25 shops including a bookshop; a supermarket and various smaller food stores; a sports shop; a shop selling TVs, radios and other electronics; and a large shopping centre on the city’s central square. For down time there were 27 canteens, cafés and restaurants distributed throughout the city.

Each winter the buildings here become more hazardous as rainwater seeps in, freezes, expands, and damages the brickwork. When the ice thaws, water washes away the mortar, leading to collapses. School No. 1 has had two such collapses in the last few years, and it can be assumed many other buildings in Pripyat are in a similarly delicate state due to lack of maintenance. Within another 25 years I’d expect quite a few to have fallen down. I’m surprised it’s taken such a relatively brief period of time for nature to begin reclaiming the city.

The ‘Prometheus’ cinema, so called because an obsidian-black statue of the Greek Titan Prometheus once stood watch over the entrance during the city’s heyday, emerges from a huddle of trees. We peek inside, but it’s now just a hollow shell, with little of interest. Pressed for time, we can’t linger. Through some more urban jungle appears the entrance to the music school beneath an abstract tile mosaic - not something you see every day. It’s a nice effect, one of the less bland exteriors in the city. I imagine it was intended to encourage creative and innovative thinking, an architectural and philosophical addition I admire. Inside the hall, a majestic, lone grand piano sits atop an empty stage. It’s tragic that such a magnificent instrument has been left here to rot, and part of me is sad that the piano was never stolen, as infeasible as that would have been. At least it could still be played if it had - now there’s only a dull, muffled thud as I tap the ivory-stripped keys. Near the back of the hall, someone’s placed a solitary chair facing the stage. It looks out of place in a hall that would’ve been filled with life; the last of its kind. Upstairs, in a practise room with a worryingly spongy floor, I find another piano, this one in a much worse state. All four legs and several keys are missing, its twisted and broken strings exposed to the air like entrails.

I want to write in a little more detail about radiation sickness - technically known as acute radiation syndrome - because it’s important to convey exactly what it does to a human being who’s received an extreme dose, like those plant workers who saved Chernobyl. Low amounts of radiation are relatively harmless. We’re all exposed to the natural background radiation of cities, planes, phones, even the Earth itself every moment of every day, and this is nothing to worry about. While every person’s body reacts differently, the following is a good general indicator of the consequences. It’s often stated that radiation has no taste, but those who absorbed the highest doses at Chernobyl all reported a metallic taste in their mouths immediately upon exposure, so it seems that if the dose is high enough to kill you, you’ll definitely taste it. It should be noted that a dose high enough to kill you will also make your body so radioactive that you’ll be a major risk to everyone around you.

Once exposed, nausea and vomiting will begin almost immediately, and within a short space of time your tongue and eyes will swell, followed by the rest of your body. You’ll feel weakened, as if the strength has been drained from you. If you’ve received a high dose of direct exposure - as in this scenario - your skin will blanche dark red within moments, a phenomenon often called nuclear sunburn. An hour or two after exposure, you’ll gain a pounding headache, a fever and diarrhoea, after which you’ll go into shock and pass out. After this initial bout of symptoms, there’s often a latent period during which you’ll start to feel like you’re recovering. The nausea will recede, along with some swelling, though other symptoms will remain. This latent period varies in duration from case to case, and of course it depends on the dose, but it can last a few days. It’s cruel because it gives you hope, only to then get much, much worse. The vomiting and diarrhoea will return, along with delirium. An unstoppable, excruciating pain seethes through your body, from the skin down to your bones, and you’ll bleed from your nose, mouth and rectum. Your hair will fall out; your skin will tear easily, crack and blister, and then slowly turn black. Your bones will rot, forever destroying your ability to create new blood cells. As you near the end, your immune system will completely collapse, your lungs, heart and other internal organs will begin to disintegrate, and you’ll cough them up. Your skin will eventually break down entirely, all but guaranteeing infection. One man from Chernobyl reported that when he stood up his skin slipped down off his leg like a sock. At high doses, radiation will change the very fabric of your DNA, turning you quite literally into a person other than the one you were before. And then you’ll die, in agony.