Travel

Nature's Revenge

Inside Chernobyl's Zone of Alienation, one of the largest wildlife preserves in Europe teaches us a lesson about the durability of nature and the fragility of man

By: Donovan Webster; Photographer: Christopher Sturman
Published: November 2008   [ Updated: Dec 16, 2008 - 12:59:59 PM ]

The top-floor viewing area of a luxury hotel in Pripet, Ukraine, overlooks a city that once teemed with life. The giant ferris wheel—rising an enormous 150 feet into the sky—is becoming entangled. Trees have sprouted through the asphalt around its base, and in the day's breeze, the vegetation's full, green, midsummer leaves flutter against the wheel's yellow passenger gondolas, while streaks of rust work slow, abstract-expressionist decay down its steel supports.

To the wheel's left are other carnival attractions: a rusted "flying umbrella" ride, its red coat of paint peeling. Farther left, the bumper-car arena stands shattered: Its roof is gone, its overhead electrical grid a shambles, the cars rusted and crumbling. All of it is amok with weeds.

In any direction, a city of stolid 15-story apartment blocks—a metropolis once home to 45,000 people—stands empty. And as the day's gusts blow stronger, the only noise beyond wind in the trees is the slamming of unsecured doors as drafts weave down the empty apartment-building hallways, having slipped in through left-open balcony doors and shattered windows.

Standing in this abandoned amusement park, beneath a blue sky tufted with bright cumulus clouds, the off-kilter truth of this place smashes home. To really comprehend man's thumbprint on earth so far, not to mention see what nature is capable of when left untended by human beings, everyone should vacation in one of Europe's largest wilderness parks—though they'll probably want to do it only once. That's because this vast wildlife preserve is a place called Chernobyl.

A towering irony of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster—the worst environmental accident in history—is that it began as a safety check.

Near midnight on April 25, 1986, in the state of Ukraine along the Soviet Union's European boundary, the Chernobyl facility's Reactor 4 was to be shut down for routine maintenance. In advance of taking Reactor 4 off-line, though, supervisors decided to see if—during its powering down—enough electricity was still generated to run its emergency cooling system, which existed to drop core temperatures should a crisis arise.

At 1:23 a.m. on April 26, as Reactor 4 was proceeding off-line without incident, steam conduits between the reactor core and the turbines used to create electricity suddenly strangled shut. Within seconds—and for reasons not fully understood, though human error is prominently mentioned—reactor power spiked to 100 times normal, overheating and rupturing fuel rods inside the core. As the nuclear reaction ran out of control, pressures inside the sealed core container spiked, and Reactor 4's containment vessel exploded, literally blowing its 640-ton top. When air hit the nuclear core, there was a second explosion, throwing a sparking, spitting fireball nearly a mile into the sky and hurling fragments of burning nuclear fuel across the landscape.