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Ghost Town

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louisev:
There is a website I have found called "Ghost Town", with pictures largely taken by a woman known only as Elena, a resident of Kiev and the daughte rof a scientist who has been studying and working on the Chernobyl nuclear fallout disaster for the past 20 years.  Her photo essays and unprecedented access to the site of this enormous disaster are breathtaking and sobering:

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/default.htm

ifyoucantfixit:


 
       I just finished lookin/reading that story or essay.  It was one of the most profoundly touching

and frightening experiences I have ever seen.  I suppose in my mind I knew and understood the

magnitude of that most unholy of disasters.  But nothing in your own imaginings can prepare you

for the actual act of seeing and feeling that total and complete devastation.  Such a brave young

woman to embark on that journey, in order to make that photo essay for others to experience.


                                                             Thanks Louise for that          janice

Garry_LH:
The one thing I have been looking for since this happened, and I can't find any mention of it, is how much this increased the background radiation here in the US and other countries around the world. For heavens sake, they were condemning lambs on the highlands of Scotland.

Just the fallout from our own weapons tests in the fifties and sixties, you can trace the pattern of it in the increased cancer rates in folks that were directly expoused to it. I remember the year after my sister died of leukemia in her early forties, that they pointed out the area we lived in as having received the nastiest part of this fallout... And in the same voice, they said everyone should be fine so long as they hadn't drank the local milk!  I can remember how we would take our one gallone glass jugs back to the dairy every weekend and buy our milk there for the next week.
Ok... I'm done ranting... Not!
Why does it seem to me that governments always end up becoming the enemies of their own people?

louisev:
This is particularly notable in the case of Chernobyl where people lived in the dead zone for up to a week after the accident, most of whom received lethal doses of radiation during this inexplicable cover-up by the Soviet government.

As Elena says in her photo essay, no one knows how many have died from Chernobyl, conservative estimates from the government say 4,000.  But more realistic estimates say as many as 400,000.  Almost all of the "liquidators" (illustrated on one of the pages) who were pressed into labor to contain the graphite fire by dumping tons and tons of boron onto it from helicopters, died from radiation sickness, as did those who built the cement "sarcophagus" that is gradually giving way over the years and will need to be rebuilt.  It is a horrible and chilling mystery, and one that the post Soviet governments of Belarus and Ukraine (and Russia) are not anxious to share more information about!

MaineWriter:
Louise, thank you for posting this. It is an amazing thing to see. I had no idea...

L

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