Downtown Poleskoye

Downtown Poleskye looks like after nuclear bombardment, like a cross of Stalingrad 1943 with Hiroshima 1945.

Riding here is a slalom between trees growing from asphalt and opened sewer hatches. This used to be a children's toy and clothing store.

This is my dad checking radiation level in this store. He is retired now, but still interested in environmental issues. Like many, he believes that people could live here once more. Poleskoye is cleaner than other places, with the average radiation level in town being under 20 microroentgen per hour. In a few places it will still jump up to 50 microroentgen per hour. Someone visiting here during the summer would experience double those levels because in summer the radiation count is higher everywhere. Sometimes I just hang out with my dad in some wasteland. The Geiger counter he uses was made back in 1986. After Chernobyl disaster there was a shortage of radiation detecting devices and, in a panic, authorities began to hastily produce devices with scale of only 100 microroentgen. Those Geiger counters were completely useless, because in Chernobyl the radiation levels were hundreds of times higher than that...way off the scale. In those days, the level of radiation in my home in Kiev was about 1000 microroentgen an hour...only now, after 20 years, are those old devices finally becoming usable.