Pripyat

Like my earlier videos, here is a video I made while driving around the abandoned streets of Pripyat. Pripyat was a city created by the USSR in 1970 for workers from the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant to live. The almost 50,000 residents were evacuated 36 hours after the accident.

The song at the end of the video is "Wonderful Far-Away" from the Soviet TV miniseries Guest from the Future (Гостья из будущего) from 1985. The song also features in a documentary about Pripyat before the nuclear disaster.

Chernobyl Town

Here is a video I made while driving through the town of Chernobyl. The town is about nine miles away from the nuclear power plant, and as you can see in the video, there are a fair number of people who live in the town. These people work at the power plant, build the new containment building or support the people doing those two jobs. Around 6000 people, predominantly men, work in the Exclusion Zone. Although most of them live outside the zone and commute in each day.

Chernobyl

This week I went on a two day tour of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The highlights of the trip were getting up close to reactor 4 and visiting Pripyat. I am intending do to a couple of posts on the trip, but as a taster of what is to come, here is a video I took as we drove past the nuclear power plant.