INSIDE CHERNOBYL’S ABANDONED CITY
ASOUTH Wales photographer has described his “quite incredible” journey to the abandoned city which sits within the 20km exclusion zone created after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
In the early hours of April 26, 1986, reactor number four in Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, resulting in substantial radioactive fallout, with its effects felt as far away as Wales.
The disaster is believed to have caused the death of at least 4,000 people, with a further untold number of children born with abnormalities as a result of the radiation.
It is regarded as one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, leaving a huge area of abandoned land.
Cai Morgan, a photographer and video blogger from Pontypridd, visited a nursery, supermarket and school in the empty city of Pripyat – labelling it “the closest anyone will ever get to a postapocalyptic world”.
He arranged the visit as the producer of a Welsh language travel series called “24 hours in...” which launched in April on S4Crun YouTube channel PUMP.
Cai, who runs the channel, said he wanted to do a one-off document a r y very different to other episodes in the series. He said: “The idea of the series is to go to different places and tour cities around Europe – we’ve been to Berlin, Madrid and Iceland. We’d go on tours with locals. “Chernobyl has been something that has always interested me. It’s got this history which didn’t happen all that long ago, and we said we wanted to do something very different. “It would be a factual, short documentary. Also, as a photographer it was a very interesting prospect to take photos of a place like that.” Cai explained how he arranged the visit to the ghost land – and how safe he felt there once he had arrived. “It’s in a 20km exclusion zone around the reactor so you can’t just wander in,” he said. “There were lots of forms to fill in, and we had help from a travel company which arranges trips there. “There’s still radiation there, but the government has done work to clean and decontaminate – they’ve even raised the soil to make sure the radiation has gone.
“But obviously you can’t clean everywhere around 20km and there are pockets which still have high radiation levels.
“We got about 200m away from reactor number four, and they’re still working on it.
“There’s still radiation coming from it, and we were only allowed to stay about 10 to 15 minutes.
“We carried around a Geiger counter which tells you how much radiation is present at each place.
“Overall, it’s still higher thann somewhere like Cardiff, for instance, but what we detected was only a little bit more radiation thann an hour spent on an aeroplane.”
Having visited the abandonedd city of Pripyat, the Pontypridd man n likened it to something out of a film m – and said it was evident that residents were ordered to leave in an instant.
He reported seeing pencil cases s still on children’s desks at a school, , and finding dolls at a nursery which h had been lying there for 30 years.
Cai added: “Eerie was the bestt word to describe it.
“The thing that really struck me was how nature was taking over – which is really ironic seeing as its history has been shaped by something so man-made.
“We visited the city of Pripyat, which was built by the government to attract people to work at Chernobyl.
“They built lots of amazing stuff for the 50,000 people living there, and it’s just abandoned.
“It’s the closest thing anyone will ever get to a post-apocalyptic world.”