Pristine apartments in Pripyat. Stalker's apartment, Pripyat
I have long wanted to write a post on this complex and unpleasant topic. I think that it is necessary to write and talk about this.
Looting in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone existed almost from the first day of the creation of the Zone itself and continues in one form or another until today. I would single out two major waves of looting of the ChEZ - the first wave was in the late eighties, when looters stole household appliances, furniture, carpets and everything else more or less valuable from Pripyat. It must be said that at this time the looters were not very active, since in Pripyat measures were taken to protect buildings and prevent the taking away of things, many of which posed a direct radiation danger - everything more or less valuable was taken to the Rainbow store (for further use for the needs of the ChEZ), and some of the things were taken to burial grounds. The entrances of the city were under alarm, the wires of which were connected to the central checkpoint of the city, and the streets were patrolled from time to time by armed guards on BRDM-2.
The second wave began around the end of the nineties and actively developed in the 2000s - after Pripyat was finally abandoned and many research projects that were based on the city’s infrastructure were curtailed. The few household items that were in Pripyat at that time were already morally obsolete and did not represent any value, and in the “second wave” mainly scribers and non-ferrous scribers came to the city - their prey was cast iron, steel, copper and aluminum from various buildings and structures. One of the major thefts of those years was covered in detail on the Internet - a whole truck arrived in Pripyat to remove sawed-off cast iron batteries from apartments.
So, today we will walk through the buildings and structures of the Chernobyl Zone and look at the traces of the activities of the looters.
01. Pripyat, savings bank building. It was one of the first to be plundered, searching everything from top to bottom in search of money and bonds - I believe this happened back in the second half of the eighties. Please note the lack of glazing in the staircase - these are already traces of the activities of the “second wave” looters, who stole huge aluminum windows in almost all the central buildings of the city, including the savings bank, the Energetik cultural center, a restaurant and many others.
To be honest, I have a hard time imagining how it was possible to pull off such a large-scale operation - apparently, the guards at the checkpoint were bribed and pretended that they did not hear the sound of hammer drills and did not see the trucks loaded with aluminum driving through the checkpoint.
02. Central department store of the city. The upholstered furniture appeared here from the second floor of the same building, where there was a furniture department - someone stole it downstairs. The building still had panoramic windows intact, but they disappeared in the 2000s.
As Ukrainians joke, at about the same time Obolon beer appeared in Ukraine in aluminum cans :)
03. Box office of the Prometheus cinema. Apparently, they were also stolen back in the eighties. Behind the bars lie two long-opened metal safes. In general, cash registers and banks were robbed first of all - they were looking for passbooks, checks, bonds and money.
04. Pripyat commission store. There are a bunch of electrical cabinets from nearby buildings lying around here. It’s difficult to say who brought them here and when.
05. Household goods store. Perhaps, of all the shops in Pripyat, it is in the worst condition - there is literally nothing left inside. There’s a green frame from some kind of road bike lying around, there are a couple of racks left, the remains of display cases - that’s all. The store has been in this state for a very, very long time. I think he was one of the first to be robbed “on a tip,” because they knew that there could be valuable things here.
06. Cafe "Pripyat" on the city embankment. Here you can see traces of not just looting, but also real vandalism - overturned bar counters, broken remains of stoves in the kitchen. Someone was just breaking into the cafe.
07. To prevent theft part household appliances in Pripyat they took me to the huge premises of the central store "Rainbow". The store was under alarm until about the end of the nineties. Now all the things in the store are no longer needed by anyone and are of no interest to looters - time has done its work.
08. Now let's look inside residential buildings. A typical Pripyat entrance looks like this. All mailboxes have been opened, and all equipment has long been stolen from all electrical boxes. The entrances were in this state by the end of the nineties - in the German video about Pripyat from 1999, the electrical boxes were already broken.
09. Often near the entrance you can see the remains of some things that were dragged and dragged, but were not dragged.
10. Inside some of the entrances you can see a smoked ceiling - these are already traces of the activities of the “second wave” of looters - they collect wires and burn insulation to get pure copper and aluminum - work that is very mysterious to me due to the disproportion of the forces invested and the funds received as a result.
11. Some entrances are literally littered with the remains of broken furniture that someone once pulled out of apartments and threw on the stairs.
12. An old chair by the garbage chute.
13. Remains of a broken stove, some torn electrical appliance, pulled out cabinets and chairs. Even a few were stolen from the floor square meters tiles On some floors there are also cut pieces of plumbing pipes lying around - apparently, copper taps were unscrewed from them.
14. The metal structures of the elevator shaft are still intact - I think this is only due to the difficulty of dismantling them without special tools and without urban mountaineering skills.
15. Elevator shaft of the Pripyat sixteen-story building. All equipment is broken. These metal plates that resemble the letter “W” are parts of the transformer core on which copper wire was once wound - now all of it has been stolen.
16. The corridor of one of the Pripyat “three rubles”. Everything was ransacked and taken away back in the eighties and nineties - this was done either by disinfection soldiers or by looters. Or both.
17. All apartments in Pripyat look something like this. On one of the forums I once came across a question: is it now possible to find an apartment in some distant corner of Pripyat, “which everyone has forgotten about,” and where everything remains “like in 1986.” I can say with absolute confidence that the last such apartment ceased to exist in the late eighties and early nineties. All apartments in Pripyat have now been opened and destroyed; looters have visited each one dozens of times. A “standard” Pripyat apartment looks like this - empty closets in the hallway, a sofa and the remains of a broken “wall” in the living room, an empty bedroom, a broken stove in the kitchen, children’s sandals and old photographs on the floor of the nursery. All.
I won’t write much about apartments; I’ve talked about them several times.
18. Roof of a sixteen-story building. Someone pulled out an old mattress here, which had already decayed. I fully accept the version that the mattress has been lying here since 1986 - in Pripyat it was quite popular to sunbathe on the roofs of buildings. In the nineties, I heard a story that someone was sunbathing on the roof on the ill-fated day of April 26, 1986, receiving a “nuclear tan” in a few hours (the sun significantly enhances the effect of background radiation). Perhaps it happened here.
19. Roofs of houses. It's surprising that TV antennas haven't been cut off yet.
20. Electrical box in the Prometheus cinema. One switch was stolen, but for some reason the other was left behind.
21. Administrative buildings of the cinema. All the doors have long been opened, the rooms have been ransacked.
22. A cut battery, which for some reason was not dragged to the car.
23. At some entrances of the city you can see the remains of a contact alarm system that worked in Pripyat until the early 1990s.
24. Fish farm building near the Fourth Power Unit; it functioned as a scientific base until around the early 2000s. As you can see, everything here has already been taken away too.
25. Former kitchen at the base. As always, the burners were knocked out and stolen from the stove. What's valuable about them? Why do they always get stolen?
26. Buildings of the ZGRLS "Duga", the famous "Chernobyl-2". Near the entrance there is a whole bunch of mounting trusses from old computing devices.
27. Inside the premises there are entire rooms filled with electrical circuit boards, from which, apparently, some valuable parts containing gold and platinum were removed.
28. Former hardware room. These racks are the remains of old computers, most likely running on punched cards. There's nothing inside. However, I think that in this particular case it was not the work of looters, but simply the equipment was taken away from here.
29. The dismantled forced ventilation motor and the corner elbow of the ventilation duct - and this is definitely the work of looters - were knocked down from the ceiling and torn apart.
30. Lecture room from the “training room”. There were some electrical units in these chipboard consoles, which have now all been torn out.
31. Electrical switch box near the Dugi antennas. Only mechanical parts and wire terminals remained inside.
32. Barracks building. This black ceiling is the same traces of fires made of wires as in the Pripyat entrances.
33. Locksmith workshop. Everything valuable has long been stolen.
34. At the Chernobyl-2 checkpoint you can find the following remains of some electronics:
35. In the city of Chernobyl itself, in the non-residential part of the city, houses like these have been preserved.
36. Everything inside has long been looted and broken.
The main problem with the illegal export of things, equipment and materials from the ChEZ is that radioactive items and materials end up in uncontrolled circulation. Tiles from Pripyat are now in someone’s home, melted irradiated ferrous metal continues to “shine” in new parts, and people continue to breathe radioactive dust from old radios.
When you mention this city, everyone has different thoughts. Someone wants to get here and just take a walk. Someone will be saddened by remembering that terrible accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which claimed the lives of thousands of people. And someone will have an acute longing for home... for something gone... for something lost forever...
The city of Pripyat is the famous city of nuclear scientists, built for workers of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. A unique experiment of the Soviet Union. Perhaps the closest place to the unfulfilled utopia of built communism. Specialists who came here were given warrants for apartments; on store shelves one could even find things that were not available in Kyiv. The city encouraged and supported in every way the creative and other hobbies of its residents. It was even partially resolved private business. Such a policy was absolutely atypical for the Soviet Union, and even more so for the regime closed city, and it bore fruit. The city's population grew rapidly. The annual increase in population was about one and a half thousand people, more than half of whom were newborns. The average age of the population was about 30 years. The city of nuclear workers was rapidly expanding, land development was underway, new houses, schools, kindergartens were built, the plans remained to build a spacious embankment and the 6th microdistrict, until a terrible disaster struck...
Instead of an introduction:
Less than a day later, after the accident, due to the sharply deteriorating radiation situation, a plan was urgently developed to evacuate the city. Approximately 1,200 buses and 200 trucks were used for this purpose. The city was divided into 6 sectors. Traffic routes and settlement addresses for residents were determined. On April 27, 1986 at 14:00, the complete evacuation of the city began. In two and a half hours, the city of 48 thousand was completely empty. Only the station workers who preserved Pripyat, employees of law enforcement agencies and other ministries remained.
Unfortunately, the city turned out to be too polluted. Living in it, despite the complex of decontamination works, turned out to be impossible. For almost 28 years now, the city has been abandoned and is gradually being plundered by looters.
Residents were allowed to return to their apartments for their belongings only at the end of the summer of 1986. By the May Day holidays, refrigerators were completely filled, and corpses of cats and dogs, left for a couple of days, were met at the doorstep. There was a terrible stench in the closed apartments. They took away mainly documents and personal belongings, and only those that the dosimetrists allowed to be taken. Until this time, the entire city (as well as Chernobyl and many villages) was undergoing decontamination: houses and asphalt were washed, the top layer of earth was removed and buried. The liquidators, accompanied by police officers on duty, climbed the fire escapes onto the balconies and threw all the things from there and took them to the burial grounds. After the residents took their belongings from the apartments, everything that remained was sent to burial grounds.
We traveled a long way to the center of the zone along the “western trail” and by the end of the day we checked into an empty apartment not far from the center of Pripyat. It's time to plunge into the atmosphere of a dead city. The day began with a tour of neighboring apartments.
Crumbling plaster and wallpaper coming off the walls is a typical situation in a Pripyat apartment.
The reason lies in high humidity and precipitation (most of the windows in the apartments are broken). During the liquidation of the accident, roofing material was removed from the roofs of houses and transported to burial grounds. It is clear that the waterproofing from such measures was violated. After rain, the upper floors of almost all houses leak, and moisture seeps into the lower floors. The photo shows large smudges and drip marks on the floor.
The windows of many apartments were broken. During the liquidation of the accident, all things were thrown directly from the windows. Many of them didn't even bother to open.
Due to the small amount of furniture (everything valuable was taken to burial grounds or stolen), the atmosphere of renovation reigns here. At the same time, mostly large-sized cabinets, sofas, plumbing fixtures and sometimes refrigerators with stoves remained.
Let's go upstairs. All exits, both to the apartments and to the roofs, are open. During our entire stay in the city, I did not notice a single intact castle.
This is such a dull landscape from above.
Near the houses there are still objects and things that were once thrown from the windows.
Let's go explore the city itself.
To my eyes, Pripyat appeared gloomy and gloomy in an autumnal way. There is complete silence everywhere. There are not only the usual city noises, but even birds. Only occasionally the wind rustled the leaves and slammed open doors and windows.
We begin our tour from the main stadium. A popular place among tourist routes, so we got up early to avoid bumping into the tour group.
The entire stadium field, as well as most of the open spaces in the city, is overgrown with trees, which in 28 years have managed to grow to the level of the 4th floor and above.
Main lobby.
Corridor under the stand.
It is worth noting that the background radiation on the stadium field is quite high. In some places the dosimeter showed a value of 1000 microroentgens/hour.
While we were enthusiastically exploring the stadium, we heard the mechanical noise of an engine somewhere nearby. Everyone immediately missed them, as if they were on command. The next moment, two white vans pulled out from around the corner of a nearby house. There was no time to think, instincts took over. The next moment everyone was lying on the ground.
Meanwhile, the vans drove even closer to us and stopped some 50 meters away. Due to the lack of greenery, we could easily be seen in the low and sparse grass. Having quickly whispered, we did not wait to see what would happen and rushed from a low start to the nearest house. The building turned out to be a hostel.
Hiding on one of the upper floors, we carefully looked out the window. There was a tour group on the buses. Some people glanced in our direction. Still would! Go on an official excursion and see “live stalkers” :) We were in no hurry to leave the building and decided to explore it a little.
An illegible slogan. Everything here is imbued with former Soviet patriotism and pride.
Activity room.
Let's go up to the roof.
To our pleasant surprise, there was an excellent view of the central amusement park from above. In the center is the famous Ferris wheel, which has become a kind of calling card of the “ghost city”.
Most open areas in Pripyat have been subjected to high level infection. This applies not only to squares and streets, but also to roofs. As I wrote above, one of the reasons for leaks in houses is the “removed” layer of roofing material during the liquidation of the accident. On the remaining pieces the background greatly exceeds the norm, on the cleaned areas only by dozens.
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant complex is only 3 km from us, but because of the gloominess it seems as if the station is 10 kilometers away.
The official opening of the park was scheduled for May 1, but it is known that before the opening they made a trial run of the attractions. According to one version, it took place on April 27 to avoid rumors about the accident and distract from thoughts about evacuation.
And this is how a woman eyewitness recalls the opening of the park: “The Ferris wheel also managed to work before the accident. I rode it myself. And not for free, I bought a ticket. I wanted to ride the cars, but I couldn’t get a chance to ride them - the crowd was huge. But there were significantly fewer people willing to take the wheel. But the woman who managed it apparently did not have time to study the instructions on how to seat people correctly, so it turned out to be a serious incident. We had a great time then. This worker put people in each booth. And when half of the wheel was tightly filled, and the other, on the contrary, remained completely empty, the wheel spontaneously broke off sharply and began to roll up and down, seeking balance, until the loaded booths ended up at the bottom of the wheel. The sight was creepy, because... the axle on which the wheel was mounted wobbled greatly. It felt like the wheel would fall on its side. Some of the boys who were lower down jumped off in all directions. The woman herself was very scared. Turned off the wheel. When it stopped, she began to turn it on and off little by little, first from every second booth, then even less frequently, until she had dropped everyone off. We were lucky, we did 2 more laps for free. Maybe because of this incident it no longer worked, or maybe some flaw was discovered in it. We rode exactly a week before the accident, because I only came home to Pripyat on weekends and was at a pedagogical practice in Polesskoye. This is the kind of fact that took place in the history of the cultural park that never opened.”
In addition to the wheel, the park has a race track, boats and a children's carousel. There is little left of the boats now. One of them is pulled out into the middle of the square - teddy bears or dolls with their legs torn off are planted in it and staged photographs are taken against the background of the wheel.
The background radiation in the park greatly exceeds the norm. This is due to the fact that during the liquidation, helicopters that participated in extinguishing the fire at the station landed on the open area.
Somewhere nearby we heard a mechanical noise, and we decided to go to another place.
Information stands.
The Polesie Hotel was located next to the park. In April 1986, the hotel was a dosimetry post and military personnel lived there.
Main lobby.
Elevator hall.
Nature takes over houses from the inside, breaking through thick ceilings.
In most houses, looters cut out all the metal, but in the central part of the city, handrails and radiators still survived.
Looters are the problem of the current exclusion zone. They most likely work under the guise of zone security, because... the results of their labors are exported on an industrial scale, and it is almost impossible to do this illegally.
We go up to the roof.
The central square of the city. On the right is the building of the Energetik cultural center and the city executive committee. In the background are two 16-story buildings with coats of arms. We will climb onto one of them later.
A sign on a nine-story building between two towers reads: “May you be a worker, not a soldier.” It turned out that the peaceful atom is not so harmless... By the way, this house was lined with tiles brought from Togliatti, and people called it Togliatti.
Pripyat is one of the surviving monuments of Soviet architecture and style. Everything here is frozen in the distant 86th. Sectional panel houses, spacious streets, signs - all this conveys the spirit of the Soviet past. I was so used to the annoying advertising of large cities that walking along deserted streets with a complete absence of information garbage was a real pleasure for me.
The central street of the city is Lenin Avenue. People dubbed it "Broadway".
View of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant complex.
We move towards one of the high-rise buildings. By the time we descended, several tour groups had appeared on the square. It’s not far to go directly, but we go around the main square of the city in a roundabout way. Due to the lack of foliage, the streets are clearly visible, and all crossings have to be made with large detours, while the streets had to be crossed carefully and quickly.
Pripyat apple tree. The background is just a little higher than normal.
All over the city, here and there, the famous graffiti - “Shadows of Hiroshima” flashes. They depict the shadows of people burned during a nuclear explosion, painted by a group of artists 20 years after the accident.
Meanwhile, several excursion buses appeared on the square at once.
Just in case, we don't stick our neck out too much.
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant from one more angle.
A little chronicle:
For six months after the accident at the station, dangerous work was underway to clear the area of rubble and build the “Shelter” protective complex, popularly referred to as the “sarcophagus.”
At the cost of incredible human efforts and material costs the assigned task was completed in short time. After eliminating the consequences of the accident, the stopped power units 1 and 2 were restarted, and half a year later the third one was restarted. For almost 15 years, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant operated and generated income, which made it possible to carry out maintenance of the exclusion zone without additional subsidies from outside. However, under the influence of politicians, including from the European Union, a program was developed to completely close the station. In December 2000, electricity generation was completely stopped.
In April 2012, construction began on a large-scale arch-shaped structure “Shelter - 2”, which will be placed over the existing sarcophagus. The height will be 92 m, and the span of the arch will be 257 m.
The existing sarcophagus (the Shelter object) still provides insulation and protection from radiation, but does not allow work to remove nuclear fuel from the sarcophagus. The new protective structure should, in addition to protecting environment, both will allow us to begin work on processing the radioactive materials contained inside the Shelter object, and to carry out repairs to the emergency parts of the shelter itself. The official name of the project is “New Safe Confinement”.
On this moment All work on the construction of the structure is planned to be completed in 2015, but this is only the beginning...
Robotic systems will be installed inside the structure for the step-by-step dismantling of the power unit structures and the remains of the reactor down to the base.
In a global perspective, it is planned to completely recultivate and transform the territory of the nuclear power plant into an open field. It is unknown how long it will take to implement the entire project, but certainly not one decade. The specificity of the work is “jewelry” and mistakes here are not excusable.
St. Kurchatova.
More street art.
Finally, we took a group photo on the coat of arms. Andrey was filming the story on a video camera and, when he showed the surroundings on Zoom, he drew attention to the trio walking separately from the excursion groups. The silhouettes were in clothing atypical for a tourist, and seemed to be peering in our direction. Through the viewfinder it was clear that they were looking at us through binoculars. A few seconds later, the brave stalkers rushed headlong down the stairs
We were faster and ran into the next block. But they did not relax.
Studio.
All shops in the city had their own numbering.
Evening is approaching and the streets are gradually getting dark. There is no point in walking around the city at night - visibility is zero, and there is no point in flashing a flashlight once again, and we have already attracted attention to ourselves. Therefore, we go to our squat.
Evening is approaching and the streets are gradually getting dark. It’s better not to walk around the city in the dark - visibility is zero, and you can’t flash your flashlight too much, and we’ve already attracted attention to ourselves. Therefore, we go to our squat.
On the way to one of the apartments, we came across a piano. No matter how many years and how many curious hands try to play on it, it is still in working order.
Upon arrival at the squat, it turned out that we had no water to cook dinner. Where can you find clean water in Pripyat without picking up polluting particles? You won't believe it! - 10 meters from the radioactive waste repository. We set off with Andrey in search of her.
This is the city water supply center. Its location was suggested to us by the guys we met on the way to the center of the zone. If it weren’t for their advice, most likely I would have had to run for water all the way to the river embankment. Pripyat.
This place was the only one of our entire hike where the water turned out to be clear and did not have the taste of swamp mud.
We successfully completed the task and, after a hearty dinner and emotional gatherings, went to bed. Let me once again insert a photo of our squat. It’s already painfully cozy :)
Ahead of us is a visit to some famous places in Pripyat: the Energetik cultural center, the Lazurny swimming pool, a kindergarten, and also a run through the city burial ground. More on all this in the next review!
The terrible tragedy of Chernobyl collected many victims. The decontamination of Pripyat also cost serious victims, since many liquidators of the consequences of the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant received a large share of radiation. Now there is a lot of debate about the feasibility of these works, because already in May 1986 it was clear that it would not be possible to live the same life in Pripyat. Nevertheless, decontamination helped to avoid the massive spread of radioactive objects outside the exclusion zone, although looters are still finding something to profit from.
In this post we will take a look at how the work to decontaminate the city of nuclear scientists took place.
First, let's evaluate the scale of the work. Here is a post-accident photo of Pripyat - this is spring or early summer of 1986; Almost the entire city was included in the photo. As you can see, Pripyat was very small and compact - 5 microdistricts, each of which was a large block. The whole city is similar in size to a residential neighborhood in a city like Minsk or Kyiv. However, the decontamination work was quite extensive, because it was necessary to remove radioactive soil - even in such a small area this amounts to hundreds of tons.
Now let's look at this map. On it you can see the location of the city relative to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, plus on the map I marked the microdistricts of the city, as well as the main flows through which radioactive emissions dispersed. To some extent, Pripyat was lucky - during the days of the accident, the wind was such that the main radioactive masses seemed to “circle” the city on both sides, forming two lines of high radiation contamination, which were later called the Northern and Western traces. Even taking this into account, the exposure background in Pripyat by the evening of April 26 averaged 1 roentgen per hour (about 70-100 thousand times higher than normal); you can imagine what the background would be like in Pripyat if the flows went straight to the city.
Almost immediately after the accident, the city acquired the “special status” of a closed settlement. In order to get to Pripyat, you had to have a special pass; they were different levels admission - “Pass to Chernobyl”, “Pass to Pripyat”, “Pass everywhere”. Documents were checked at the entrance to the city; It was absolutely unrealistic for a random person to get to Pripyat at that time.
All deactivation activities can be divided into two main types of work - cleaning buildings from traces of radioactive dust and cleaning up soil - all main work falls under these two categories, plus we will also add a separate item for the removal of things to burial grounds. The photo below shows the decontamination of the dormitories of the Jupiter plant; as you can see from the map, in those parts of the city the background was quite high (and in general, in the Jupiter area, even now it is quite dirty).
The buildings were washed with the help of these special fire engines, which provided the necessary pressure. Regarding what they washed with, I came across different versions. Some write that it was ordinary water, while others say that it was a special polymer composition, which, when dried, turned into some kind of analogue of a film that bound dust and which could then be collected as garbage.
I think that both versions are plausible - in some places they could have used a special compound, and in others - ordinary water. In general, neither concrete nor brick are “activated” by radiation in any way (unlike metal) and are washed quite easily - you just need to remove all the dust and radioactive particles.
Filmed here preparatory work- Apparently, filling the car tank through a special hose.
A photograph of the laundering process. As you can see, the jet is strong enough to reach the upper floors of a typical nine-story building. I think that the pressure had to be adjusted depending on the height - after all, with a jet of such force that reaches the upper floors, you can easily break out the windows on the lower floors.
In addition to fire trucks, at least one BelAZ, converted into a UMP-1 watering truck, was also used to clean buildings. In the photo below you can see this car washing the roads on Lenin Avenue, which runs between the First and Second microdistricts of the city. I think that BelAZ was initially planned to be used for cleaning tall sixteen-story buildings, but the water compressor was too strong - according to eyewitnesses, the stream of water from BelAZ easily knocked out windows in houses.
Another part of the work (much more large-scale) involved the removal of radioactive soil and, apparently, was carried out after the buildings had been cleaned. The soil was collected in different ways everywhere. Somewhere these graders were used to cut the soil.
But basically everything was done by hand. In the photo below, a group of decontamination service soldiers manually collects soil into the back of a MAZ, the photo was taken in the courtyard of Pripyat dormitories in the First or Second Microdistrict.
Collection of soil on the territory of one of the kindergartens. As can be seen from the exposed curbs, the earth was removed quite deeply.
More soil collection:
Loading soil into the car body. I will assume that the equipment was used somewhere in the area of the Jupiter plant, where radiation levels were significantly higher than in other microdistricts.
As can be seen in some photos, the soil was cut not only with shovels, but also with some kind of hoe. In the middle of the frame you can see a dosimetrist conducting field measurements of exposure dose with something like a military dosimeter DP-5.
Break in work The soil on the left side of the lawn has already been razed, on the right it still needs to be done.
Collecting soil into trucks in one of the yards.
Control measurements of the decontaminated area, apparently this is some kind of kindergarten. Interesting details in the photo - for some reason the windows of the supposed kindergarten are covered with film, and for some reason there is no glass at all in the windows of the top floor of the high-rise building in the background. There is an assumption about the film - the kindergarten was used as a dormitory for liquidators in the spring and summer of 1986, and the film served as an additional dust filter.
Military in Pripyat.
Construction.
A rare photo - the work of disinfectants was filmed; Most likely this is late autumn 1986. All things are taken out of houses (some are simply thrown out through windows), collected in trailers and bodies and transported to burial grounds.
Only a few large-sized things like “walls” and sofas remain in the houses.
Collection and removal of contaminated items, area of the Sporting Goods store.
A fire escape near one of the Pripyat houses - I assume that things were collected in this way, which were then supposed to be used inside the perimeter of the ChEZ.
BRDM-2 on the city streets.
Attention attention! Dear residents of Pripyat! The City Council of People's Deputies reports that due to the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the city of Pripyat, an unfavorable radiation situation is developing. Party and Soviet bodies and military units are taking the necessary measures. However, in order to ensure the complete safety of people, and, first of all, children, there is a need to temporarily evacuate city residents to settlements Kyiv region. For this purpose to everyone residential building Today, the twenty-seventh of April, starting from fourteen zero zero hours, buses will arrive, accompanied by police officers and representatives of the city executive committee. It is recommended to take with you documents, extremely necessary things, and also, in case of emergency, food. The heads of enterprises and institutions have determined a circle of workers who remain on site to ensure the normal functioning of city enterprises. All residential buildings will be guarded by police officers during the evacuation period. Comrades, when temporarily leaving your home, please do not forget to close the windows, turn off electrical and gas appliances, and turn off the water taps. We ask you to remain calm, organized and orderly during temporary evacuation.
Walking around Pripyat, I decided to go into one more or less well-preserved house, to see what the apartments looked like, left by people almost three decades ago (has it really been so many years?). From the outside, the house looks quite good, almost like an ordinary residential building, but the eye notices some dissonances that are unusual in an ordinary city - black openings of broken windows, wild thickets around and a cushion of green moss near the entrance to the entrance.
The house has been preserved quite well; you can walk along its entrance without fear that the ceilings will “fold” under your feet. From the street, the facade looks like this, a typical picture for modern Pripyat - thickets of Polesie jungle, among which, if you look closely, you can suddenly see the skeletons of high-rise buildings.
Let's go into the entrance.
Let's enter carefully and carefully - remembering that the abandoned city must be preserved for future generations - this is an invaluable museum. The sign at the entrance to the entrance acquired a new, unexpectedly bitter meaning.
The entrance is impressive. What is impressive, first of all, is how nature begins to take its own from humans (I will write more about this in a separate post about Pripyat). Waterfalls flow down the walls, and there are many types of mold and moss everywhere.
Let's take a look at one of the apartments. At the entrance, I pay attention to the electrical panel - in Minsk, in houses of a similar year of construction, they look different. The contents are long gone - most likely, they were stolen by "black metalheads", of whom there are quite a few in Pripyat even now.
Apartment. On the right is the entrance to the room, double doors. Most likely it was the living room. There has been no covering on the floor for a long time - bare concrete underfoot.
Living room with balcony. On the right is a polished chipboard section. All sections of the section have long been ransacked by looters. The chair was overturned - they were also looking for something under its pillow.
One more room. Please note that the former residents even managed to change the wallpaper once - at first the room was yellow, and then it became blue.
Kitchen. There were a lot of dry leaves blowing through the open window. There was only one skeleton left of the electric stove.
Most likely, this is something like a bedside table for shoes, or the lower part of a dressing table. I saw something similar once when I was a child, but I can’t remember what it was. By the way, this very interesting feeling often arose in me in Pripyat - as if yesterday did not disappear in one second, but remained somewhere in the form of a whole and complete world - along with things, smells and sounds - and is now slowly disappearing into oblivion, disintegrating into parts.
Another platform. To better imagine the location - the shooting point is located on the entrance site itself, behind the first doorway we see two doors - to the left and straight, these are apartments - one-room and three-room. And on the right there is an electrical panel.
A living room with an adjoining room, most likely there was a children's room.
Yes, children's.
Door knob. There were definitely no handles of this type in Belarusian apartments of those years.
Kitchen. The slab was also torn to the ground. By the way, throughout Pripyat the kitchen stoves were electric.
Another room. The sideboard was expectedly gutted to the ground, literally nothing was left. I don’t want to represent the people who robbed the apartments of the abandoned city. It is possible, of course, that the extra things were simply collected and carried out by disinfectants - they, for example, threw full refrigerators out of the windows to avoid epidemics, but I think that banal looters were rummaging through the sections.
Sofa. Over the course of several decades, the gray dust on it formed some colonies and islands of life. And exactly the same yellow wallpaper existed in my Minsk apartment many years ago.
Another room. By the way, pay attention to the battery - in this house they have some interesting design, reminiscent of batteries in modern houses.
And here, for some reason, they even opened up the covering of the mattress - what could you look for there? And also pay attention to the balcony, or rather, the loggia. It is glazed. I used to think that glazing loggias in the USSR was not allowed at all, until 1989-90 exactly.
Kitchen. There are remains of tiles on the walls here.
Garbage chute.
Another apartment. Here the wallpaper has almost completely “lay down” on the floor - due to humidity and time. Today's Pripyat has already passed that “point of no return”, to which the houses could still be restored and made suitable for living.
Passage rooms. Here I stood for a long time and looked at the electrical box panel under the ceiling - and they really were once like that.
In the kitchen, instead of furniture and a stove, the remains of some kind of black insulation of a thick cable were found.
And in the room too. I can't imagine what it is.
Another room.
View of the city from the window.
In Stalker's apartment, Pripyat
When visiting high-rise buildings In Pripyat I definitely look into apartments. I try to look into one or two on each floor. At one time, back in April 2013, I rented apartments for former residents of the city, located mainly in the 2nd and 3rd microdistricts of the city. Since then I’ve somehow become attached to apartments, I don’t know why, but I enjoy going into them. The vast majority of them are empty, the remains of furniture, falling off wallpaper and a stove in the kitchen can hardly be considered as full-fledged apartment inventory. However, sometimes you come across quite good apartments. At the very least, we can conclude whether the owners of the home lived well here or not. There is also another, isolated type of Pripyat apartments, which has become a kind of subculture housing stock abandoned city. It's about about the so-called stalker apartments or apartments of “illegals” - people who prefer to visit the Zone on their own and without an official pass. In one of the high-rise buildings in the city we managed to get into just such an apartment. The life and “home environment” of illegal immigrants in a typical Pripyat apartment deserves special attention.
1)
We go into the stalker’s apartment and see this picture in one of the rooms. An interesting landscape: a doll from the entrance of "Jupiter" (the last time I saw her there), beer that is unpatriotic for Ukraine, vodka "Khlebny Dar" and two good-quality sofas that are in excellent condition, considering the current realities of Pripyat.
2)
A little stalkerish creativity on the walls of the room.
3)
Part of the kerosene stove and other attributes of the stalker's table.
4)
A bed in one of the rooms. Its rather good condition immediately catches your eye; in many Pripyat apartments the beds are simply completely rotten.
5)
Stalker furniture. The interior is quite comfortable, the apartment has a place to sleep, drink and relax comfortably.
6)
Another sofa in the room. Excellent condition.
7)
A stash in the form of underwear. She was lying on the sofa.
8)
9)
A table of illegal immigrants in a stalker's apartment. Apparently, the dinner here was nutritious.
10)
Gostovskaya pork stew in the kitchen and an empty bottle of Morshynska.
11)
Remains of the legendary "Mivina" on the windowsill.
12)
And finally, the pretentious Czech castor oil. It’s a completely lived-in apartment where lovers of illegal forays into the Zone can relax in peace. I do not specifically indicate the address and approximate location of the house.
