THE STORY BEHIND THE PHOTO
The scary doll of Chernobyl
Arnie is Explorer at Large, Northstar Travel Group and this is the beginning of a monthly column he’ll be doing for WONDERLUST
In 2016 I went to Ukraine to report on how tourism in the country was faring three years after it had kicked out Putin crony Victor Yanukovych. It was a fascinating trip and I wrote it up as a cover story for Travel Weekly, when I was its Editor in Chief.
During my visit, I made a day trip to Chernobyl. I had done a little research about what dangers were posed by the substantial amount of radioactivity still there. I read that it’s apparently safe as long as you don’t accidently inhale a speck of radioactivity into your lungs, an occurrence described as “very unlikely.”
And there were several safety protocols we were to follow, including (twice) walking through a full-body Geiger counter scanner. We were instructed exactly where to walk and were warned not to pick up anything.
Our guide, a physicist, visited Chernobyl several times a week, and there were workers who lived onsite. We even saw some residents who refused to leave their homes and had been living there since the nuclear accident. All of this gave me some sense of reassurance about what the levels of radiation I might be exposed to.
There was much that was surreal and sad on the tour, but this doll, lying on the ground for 30 years outside a nursery school, was the image that has stuck with me the most. (The handheld Geiger counter in the photo is recording about 15xs the ambient level of radiation, though that is not considered particularly dangerous.)
At the end of the tour, the Geiger counter had recorded cumulative radiation equal to about the level of exposure one receives as a passenger on a transatlantic flight.
Footnote: Crazily, when Russia attacked Ukraine from the north four years ago, they went through Chernobyl, and the officers in charge had soldiers dig trenches in radioactive dirt. If they survived the battles ahead, they doubtless will, in the long term, be haunted by that exposure.
