Thirty-one years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, one of our Observers sent us photos from his trip to the desolate Exclusion Zone. In June 2016 he went to the site in the Ukraine where a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, turning the area into one of the most radioactive places in the world.
A routine test on Reactor 4 at the plant on April 26, 1986, ended in disaster when the reactor exploded, shooting radioactive particles into the atmosphere. The explosion released 100 times more radiation than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Radioactive material later drifted on the wind to other countries across Europe.
There is still controversy over how many people actually died as a result of the accident. The World Health Organisation said in a 2006 report that "The actual number of deaths caused by this accident is unlikely ever to be precisely known." One worker was killed in the initial explosion, and acute radiation syndrome killed 28 workers in the weeks following the accident.
Photo credit: Paul-Matthew Zamsky
After the explosion, the government at the time deemed the area that lay within a nearly 30 kilometre radius uninhabitable and resettled people and entire towns within that zone elsewhere in what was formerly the USSR. The area around the blast site, called the Exclusion Zone, has gradually fallen into disrepair, seemingly stuck in time, with schools still filled with children’s exercise books, an amusement park with dodgems still in place, and even a nursery peopled by abandoned dolls. Inhabitants were not allowed to take potentially contaminated objects outside of the exclusion zone when they fled, and what is left is an eerie snapshot of life in the outskirts of the plant three decades ago.
Photo credit: Paul-Matthew Zamsky
After the area was evacuated, some residents began to trickle back. There are approximately 200 people, known as “self-settlers”, who have returned to live in the area, despite it being forbidden by the Ukrainian government because of risks to health from lingering radiation.
Now, however, tourist agencies offer carefully-regulated guided tours around select areas of the exclusion zone, far from where self-settlers live. Chernobyl was officially declared a tourist attraction in 2011, and welcomes over 10,000 tourists a year.
Photo credit: Paul-Matthew Zamsky
Photo credit: Paul-Matthew Zamsky
Photo credit: Paul-Matthew Zamsky
Photo credit: Paul-Matthew Zamsky
Paul-Matthew Zamsky is a photographer based in New York. He visited Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone in 2016, and sent us photos of the abandoned sites.
“There is a sadness attached to the place”
Going to Chernobyl was something I had wanted to do for a long time. As a photographer it’s one of the most compelling places you can visit.
Radiation is something that has no smell and no taste but you think about it as this ominous thing. I expected to go there and feel something, to feel that the place was contaminated, that something terrible happened there. But in fact when you go there you forget about radioactivity because the place is peaceful and quiet. It’s actually a beautiful area where nature has taken over again.
Photo credit: Paul-Matthew Zamsky
Photo credit: Paul-Matthew Zamsky
One thing that came out of the experience for me was somewhat surprising: I actually felt some sort of hope for humankind. Hope that despite this tragedy we were able to come in and carry out incredible feats of engineering and build a sarcophagus to contain the leaking reactor within months. People were volunteering to work on it and were sacrificing their lives to help build so that it was contained.
Photo credit: Paul-Matthew Zamsky
The disused Duga-3 radar tower. Photo credit: Paul-Matthew Zamsky
“You see the names of the towns that don't exist anymore”
It is a surreal experience being there because it has been so photographed. Some of these icons and images and monuments are so recognisable, and then you actually see them in front of you. Nothing has been altered. There is a sadness attached to the place. You can see how people’s lives were interrupted, the names of the towns that don’t exist anymore because they were abandoned.
