Typical Pripyat apartment block on Lenin Avenue; interior photograph.

Above is a typical Pripyat apartment building. Most are in bad shape now. With water running through much of them in the spring, its not uncommon to find trees now growing through floors and up on the roofs. The interiors now have been mostly looted of anything valuable, including the heating system on the walls, which have all been stolen for scrap metal. Also a point to note is that most of the trees in Pripyat now were not there in the 1980s; they have all grown in the last twenty-three years. Nature is slowly reclaiming the land.

Pripyat town square and shop 'Raduga'

This is Pripyat town square. The picture on the left is taken from the top of Hotel Polissia, one of two hotels in Pripyat. On the right of the picture you can see the Palace of Culture, Pripyat's cultural center. In the distance is a shopping complex, and towering above are 16-story apartment blocks. Shown on the right is the hardware store Raduga, once located at the base of an apartment block in the town center on Lenin Avenue. After the accident and evacuation, the town of Slavutych was constructed 50km northeast of Pripyat to house all displaced residents and workers, some who still to this day work at the plant. These workers travel in to the Chernobyl area on a special train which does not stop at Bellarussian border control and arrives directly at the CNPP.

Liquidator vehicles.

On the southwest side of the city is Pripyat Police Station. Behind that structure are many abandoned vehicles which, like all other remnants here, have been robbed of anything valuable. These vehicles were used by a collection of military and volunteers known as liquidators. These liquidators were charged with clearing the zone of radiation contamination by washing and scrubbing all surfaces. Certain villages with high radiation levels such as Kopachi, just south of the reactor, were completely buried. All that remains are mounds of land with radioactive signs on poles warning passersby. Pripyat was completely washed down also using tanks and other machinery, effectively clearing the whole city of radioactive elements, which are now being absorbed into the soil at a rate of about 1cm per year. It is estimated that between 600,000 and 1,000,000 liquidators were involved in the Exclusion Zone clean process. Varying reports estimate that about 25,000 of them are now dead and another 70,000 are ill or suffering the effects of the radiation doses they received while on the job.