Amazing website - Tour Chernobyl's "Dead Zone"

[RacinM3]

Worth taking time to check out:


http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/chapter1.html

[chop456]

Spooky.

[fourrunner]

Looks like Newark, New Jersey ! :eek:

[nrc]

Fascinating. It's a true life version of the post-apocalyptic scenes you normally only get from books or movies. It's a time capsule - a piece of Soviet era Russia stuck in time.

[racer2c]

Tully amazing and fascinating! I read through the site this morning and kept thinking about it throughout the day.
Russia has always captivated me. Maybe the Lithuanian in me.

[Cam]

Saw this on /. last night. Amazing stuff! :thumbup:

[JT265]

That is an amazing story of bumbling and communist paranoia. I flew over there last April with a physicist from Berlin that has been working there since 1989, and the stories he told me of the handling of the disaster, both at the time and since then would make ToeKnee George look like a true visionary.

We can also thank Chernobyl (which is actually in the northen part of Ukraine) for the fact that every steel mill and remelt shop in North America is equipped with a radiation detector.

Seems some enterprising young Soviet decided about '89 or so that it was safe to go in there and start cutting up scrap metal for remelt, and of course because it was really cheap all the bar mills in the country started buying the stuff.

Then the big question became, how come when I pee outside at night I glow in the dark?

[RaceGrrl]

That site is sobering, and very sad. It's creepy that she looks through the memorabilia of the city's former residents. The saddest thing of all was seeing the emergency and military vehicles lined up, and knowing that the men and women who occupied them are all dead now.

Brave (or stupid) girl.

[oddlycalm]

Perhaps the most unique site on the net that I've ever seen. Her English is a bit rough, but her biker is 100%, and you may have caught it when she refers to cars as 'cages'. :D Getting banned from riding by the reactor for doing full power burnouts was also a hoot.

Thanks for posting this, it was worth more than a few minutes. This one will have most people reflecting for a while.

oc

[Cam]

That site is sobering, and very sad. It's creepy that she looks through the memorabilia of the city's former residents. The saddest thing of all was seeing the emergency and military vehicles lined up, and knowing that the men and women who occupied them are all dead now.

Brave (or stupid) girl.


Absolutely nothing she can do about it.

ACK.... I am getting started on a rant..... Never mind.... :saywhat:

[EDwardo]

Perhaps the most unique site on the net that I've ever seen. Her English is a bit rough, but her biker is 100%, and you may have caught it when she refers to cars as 'cages'. :D Getting banned from riding by the reactor for doing full power burnouts was also a hoot.

Thanks for posting this, it was worth more than a few minutes. This one will have most people reflecting for a while.

oc


This site makes up for all the crap usually found on the net. It's amazing to think that this area has been rendered uninhabitable for, at the very least, several hundred years.

[RaceGrrl]

Absolutely nothing she can do about it.

ACK.... I am getting started on a rant..... Never mind.... :saywhat:


I agree. I didn't mean it as a criticism. It's just creepy that every person in that town had to leave all of their history behind. Everything.

I just found it sad and weird at the same time. That's what I was trying to say.

[oddlycalm]

This site makes up for all the crap usually found on the net. It's amazing to think that this area has been rendered uninhabitable for, at the very least, several hundred years.

Yep, great site on so many different levels. She manages to capture the fate of the deadzone in a way that has more impact than anything I've seen, and she had a great sense of humor and irony.

Who else by a hardcore biker could manage to get banned in a nuclear wasteland.... :D You gotta love that. There are only a half dozen living people for 50mi in any direction, and she manages to piss all of them off... :rofl: Yep, a true biker that one.

oc

[B3RACER1a]

Absolutely amazing. Is there a way we can contact her? I saw an address on the last page, I guess that is hers? Just would like to say thanks!

[racer2c]

I scanned through the massive blog over on Slashdot that Cam mentioned. Evidently she posts quite a bit on a bike forum. Here's a link.

Link to Elena (http://www.sport-touring.net/cgi-bin/msgboard/ikonboard.cgi?;act=ST;f=1;t=12967;st=90)

[nrc]

Absolutely amazing. Is there a way we can contact her? I saw an address on the last page, I guess that is hers? Just would like to say thanks!

Interested in a glow-in-the-dark Russian bride? :)

[Ziggy]

nrc, your not right!

Nova did a special on this disaster. Great TV, and yeah, it was sad (still is) National Geo also did a follow up story in the magazine a few years ago. Birth defects are more prevelant than even the IRL fan gene pool.

Ziggy

[racer2c]

Interested in a glow-in-the-dark Russian bride? :)

Rides a Ninja.
Looks in the face of danger.
Philosopher.
Makes web pages.

I don't know about him, but I think I found my soul mate!

[B3RACER1a]

LOL! :laugh:

I showed a bunch of people at work and they were amazed also. I figured I drop an email and say thanks.

[Hard Driver]

Amazing to see. Very enlightening narration. Glad I could see it WITHOUT going there. That girl is crazy. It is an exclusionary zone for a reason girl.

[Ziggy]

From the Nova program I watched. The first firefighters on the scene where escorted to the reactor at gun point. Either fight the fire and die, or turn around and we will shoot you. The first couple of waves of firefighters died with in days. All the scientist sent to study and plan for the building of the encasement are also dead. At the time of the program (this was like in 93 or 94) the one old guy scientist who was alive was starting to get ill, and his worries were who would carry on the work.

The reactor stack has a giant cover, which is in the diameter of the stack like a nickle in a pepsi bottle. It blew off when it exploded. It is now just balanced there. Remember, it weighs like hundreds of tons. When it falls, its gonna kick up alot of dust, and the escargophosis (hey, I cant spell) is not air tight.

Its a mess, and is going to be for like 80 thousand years

Look for this Nova program if this story interests you. That National Geographic article is great companion as well. I would think the Nova is on tape or DVD, and the library would be my first stop.

Ziggy

[racer2c]

Interesting Ziggy. I surfed through a Google search on the matter and found out some snipits here and there but no real detailed timeline besides what happed on the accident day. From what I could ascertain the other reactors were on line years after #4 blew and that about 10,000 people where still living in the area. From Elena's website, I got the impression that it was evacuated from day one.

[4wheeldrifter]

Incredible site, thanks for posting the link. I've also been fascinated with Chernobyl ever since I saw the Nova special on it. Incredible person to do what she did (if a little nuts).

[solpadeine]

You can find a timeline and more technical details of the disaster here:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/cherno.html

[pinniped]

Think of all the money you could save on electric lighting...and she looks good in leather too...

[Cam]

Elena has her own website (http://www.kiddofspeed.com/default.htm) now! :thumbup: :cool:

[P1]

I fell for it too but read linky (http://www.sport-touring.net/cgi-bin/msgboard/ikonboard.cgi?;act=ST;f=1;t=16439;hl=elena ). Doesn't detract from the photos and what happened there but...

[Clown]

That little bitch :mad:

[racer2c]

Her page says that the server is averaging 4000+ concurrent viewers. At first I thought that it meant it could 'handle' 4000+, but it reads like that is what it is getting. Elena needs a lesson in American capitalism. ;)

[racer2c]

Has Elena responded to these accusations? I'm a lazy scroller. :gomer:

Thinking back to the original Elena site, I found myself being drawn into the story of the accident and the pictures of the Dead Zone, her motorcycle riding didn't factor in.

[G.]

where are the pics of the new ride, spring of 04??

[oddlycalm]

I fell for it too but read linky (http://www.sport-touring.net/cgi-bin/msgboard/ikonboard.cgi?;act=ST;f=1;t=16439;hl=elena ). Doesn't detract from the photos and what happened there but...

Who says there's no quality fiction on the net...? :D

oc

[Robstar]

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story... ;)

[racer2c]

Well, I read nothing but speculation and conjecture in the supposed debunking of Elena. It wouldn't surprise me if that was fake. Or both for that matter. Watch out for motorcycle riders, their weird.

[Cam]

Well, I read nothing but speculation and conjecture in the supposed debunking of Elena. It wouldn't surprise me if that was fake. Or both for that matter. Watch out for motorcycle riders, their weird.

I am with ya there! :thumbup:

[P1]

Elena makes the LA Times:

Account of Chernobyl Trip Takes Web Surfers for a Ride

By Mary Mycio, Special to The Times

PRIPYAT, Ukraine — Kate Brown began thinking about visiting this high-rise ghost town in the mid-1990s, when she was researching a book about the region before it was evacuated after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Then she saw a website about a young woman's lone motorcycle rides through Chernobyl's exclusion zone. The site, http://www.kiddofspeed.com , attracted tens of millions of viewers and became the most-visited site on Angelfire.com, a Web page hosting service.

"I was intrigued," said Brown, an assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland-Baltimore. She spoke while strolling along the vegetation-choked sidewalks and cracked roadways of Pripyat, about a mile from the nuclear power plant where the 1986 accident took place.

"Elena," whom several Internet sources identified as Lena Filatova of Kiev, has been described as "fearless," "heroic" and "seriously whacked" in the virtual chatter the website generated.

When asked by e-mail why the story of a raven-haired beauty roaring through a radioactive wasteland attracted so much attention, cyberpunk author and futurist Bruce Sterling responded: "It's a post-apocalyptic adventure story. Very 'Mad Max.' "

And it is, evidently, equally fictional.

"That story is not true! She did not ride a motorcycle alone in the zone! She came with her husband and a friend on a regular tour," insisted Rimma Kyselytsia, who was the group's official guide. She identified the woman in the images on the website as Filatova and has the documents to show that Filatova's tour was organized by a Kiev travel agency and that her party traveled in a car provided by Chernobylinterinform, the agency that ushers all visitors to the exclusion zone.

The visit took place March 16, about two weeks after the website appeared. Since then, the curious have made their way to Chernobyl inquiring about Elena's adventure — among them two Norwegian biology teachers who arrived on bicycle hoping to retrace the journey. A guard turned them away.

"Whoever put this together was never actually here," said Kyselytsia, leafing through a printout of the images on the website. Although it has been updated several times, the site's original contents survive in duplicates elsewhere on the Internet, and on the computers of people who downloaded them.

The updated site does not appear to contain any authentic images of "Elena" or a motorcycle in any Chernobyl location. Four pictures on the updated site can be traced to a Ukrainian coffee table book published in 2000, some are aerial shots, and many are anachronisms. One photo is of chemical showers that have not existed for years. In another, the tall ventilation stack of the ruined reactor looms above some saplings. But those trees have since grown so high that only the tip of the stack is visible today.

After the March 16 trip, the website was updated with new pictures, including one of a motorcycle near a sign that reads "Chernobyl district" in Ukrainian. But that sign is several miles south of the barbed-wire fence and checkpoints surrounding the exclusion zone, which stretches almost 19 miles in all directions from the disaster site.

According to Kyselytsia and Mykola Slobodianiuk, who drove the group that day, Filatova's husband, Igor Filatov, told them that he had ridden his motorcycle to the Chernobyl checkpoint but was refused entry.

"The idea is absurd," Slobodianiuk said. "I have worked in the zone since 1986, and I have never seen anyone on a motorcycle."

Closed motor vehicles are the rule in the zone, where radiation levels are thousands of times normal in places. A moving vehicle stays ahead of the dust it raises. When it stops, it is enveloped in its own — often radioactive — wake.

After bumping for hours over the zone's crumbled, potholed and, in many places, barely existent roads, it is difficult to believe that anyone could ride a motorcycle on them.

The updated website depicts the lone rider in various zone locations, often with a motorcycle helmet in a bag slung across her shoulders.

"When I asked about the helmet, she just said her husband had some ideas," Kyselytsia recalled as she led Brown and a reporter into the Pripyat high-rise that the group had visited. "He took most of the pictures. He also staged some of them."

Kyselytsia pointed out the mailbox that the website claimed contained a hunting and fishing publication. It was empty, and Kyselytsia maintains that it was empty when she and the Filatovs entered the building.

"This one left me blinking," science fiction writer Neil Gaiman posted on his website after reading that "Elena's" story was not entirely true. "Not so much because it was a fraud, as why anyone would bother to create such a fraud."

Neither Lena nor Igor Filatov were available for comment. A woman who answered the door at their apartment said they had left town and could not be reached.

The Internet "Elena," however, is unapologetic. "I just wanted to show people Chernobyl," she wrote in an author's note after doubts about the story began to surface. "I did this for free, for no fame and I did this with love for my country."