'As the towns of Pripyat and Chernobyl slept, the ground shook beneath them.' The events that occurred in the V.I Lenin Nuclear Power station on the 26th April 1986... (TBC) The Soviet Government went to great efforts to conceal the magnitude of the disaster and down play the tragedies that occurred following mass radiation poisoning of an entire enti city. Many death tolls were never officially recognised and the official death toll is much lower than statistics suggest is accurate. 30 years on, sadly many of the victims have passed and increasingly less people protest the soviet cover up of the accident - the world is beginning to forget. However the government left behind one crucial piece of evidence that can only allude to the magnitude of what happened in Ukraine that day; the towns of Pripyat and Chernobyl. People may forget, but this landscape has not, still plagued with radiation and fallen victim to absolute abandonment, this place is a warning to a world that has too readily forgotten the tradgedy of 26th April 1986.
It was not until over 24 hours after the accident that the evacuation order for the surrounding towns of the power plant was given. Over 50,000 inhabitants were evacuated, told to take only the essensials, as they would return in 3 days. However, no one was ever to return to Pripyat.
"We didn't want to leave. The men were all drunk, they were throwing themselves under cars. The big Party bosses were walking to all the houses and begging people to go. Orders: 'Don't take your belongings!'"
And it's certainly true that Chernobyl, while an accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of cronyism, laziness, and a deep-seated indifference toward the general population. The literature on the subject is pretty unanimous in its opinion popul that the Soviet system had taken a poorly designed reactor and then staffed it with a group of incompetents. It then proceeded... to lie about the disaster in the most criminal way. In the crucial first ten days, when the reactor core was burning and releasing a steady stream of highly radioactive material into the surrounding area, the authorities repeatedly claimed that the situation was ‘under control’.
“Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There's nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air.�