A Bike Ride To Chernobyl

A Bike Ride To Chernobyl

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Bjrn Harvig is this Danish guy who rides his bike everywhere. And by everywhere, we dont mean to visit his parents or to and from work. Were talking from Copenhagen to places like Iran, Mongolia, or Uzbekistan. He recently sent us this story from a trip he took to Chernobyl and the surrounding areas, where he found out some scary stuff about how radioactive furniture has been sold all over Ukraine and beyond, and the risks of a much greater, looming disaster that could spread 35 tons of radioactive dust across the world in no time.

Before I left Copenhagen I visited Viktoria and her husband. Theyre originally from Kiev, but came to Denmark in 1987. Viktoria told me she would never forget April 26th, 1986. She had been out with some friends and they were on their way home when a couple of military buses packed with people passed them on the road. At first she thought it was a bunch of people on their way to a party or a wedding, so she and her friends cheered and waved at them. But the buses kept coming. Hundreds passed. Thousands of people crammed together and coasting past them with empty faces. Viktoria was sure that a war had begun somewhere in the Soviet Union. It was the night Chernobyls fourth reactor exploded, releasing into the air 90 times the amount of radioactive material caused by the Hiroshima bomb.

A common sign along the contaminated perimeter. This one is on the Belorussian side and says not to pick mushrooms or berries without the proper equipment, whatever that is.

Before I decided to visit the area surrounding the plant, a lot of Ukrainians asked me what I wanted to do there. Every Ukrainian has felt the consequences of the explosion in one way or another, and most would prefer to let sleeping dogs lie. Perhaps its because the disaster hasnt affected my life, but I feel its important not to forget. I felt going there would help me understand what actually happened that night in AprilI wanted to understand an event that was fucked up beyond description. In Mads Eskesens book, Chernobyl, 20 years20 lives, he asks how long an explosion lasts. Is it over when the last blast wave dies out? When the last fires are put out? When the media can no longer be bothered to report on the extent of local devastation? I wanted to see for myself.

Travelling to Chernobyl, I rode through small villages with shabby and worn down shacks where old women tended kitchen gardensthe type of villages that seem to have only old people and small children living in them. Just beyond that rural bliss, five-story concrete expressions of provincial dread stood clawing at the skies. Occasional laundry hanging on a clothesline or some flowers on a balcony were the only indications that people were living behind the closed windows. Families in those small towns live there without warm water or central heating throughout the brutal Ukrainian winter.

I got a weird sensation in my stomach when I saw the first road sign for the city of Chernobyl. After reading so much about the area, it almost felt like Dj vu. The closer I got, the more abandoned the villages. It was like approaching a warzone.

After the disaster it took the Soviet Government several days to inform the publicboth local and internationalthat a catastrophe had occurred. A couple of Swedish scientists contacted the Swedish Government after registering an exceptional level of radioactivity in the air in northern Sweden. The government knew nothing about it, so they turned their attention towards their massive eastern neighbor. At this point, the spill at Chernobyl had generated a cloud that engulfed all of Europe. I read that the territories north of Chernobyltoday the Republic of Belarussuffered from green rain in the days following the explosion. The Soviet Government, unbeknownst to the green rain sufferers, had released chemicals into the air to dissolve the highly radioactive clouds in an effort to keep them from spreading to larger Soviet cities.

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