When I checked my visitor stats, I recently found that a certain page on farkleberries (and my atomic blog, RadioActive!) was receiving an very large number of hits: it contains a post showing a photo of what appears to be a video capture of Chernobyl reactor #4 burning at night. It's a very unusual shot, and a bit of a mystery because the timestamp appears to show the picture was taken very close to the time of the reactor explosion on April 26, 1986. (I found the image on the Italian Progetto Humus ("Humus Project") site.)

It turns out many of the visits have been from the Pripyat.com forum, named after the nearby abandoned town where Chernobyl's workers and families lived until the disaster. Since my Ukrainian is rusty basically nonexistent, I tried using Altavista's Babelfish page to help translate the content directly. Unfortunately, Pripyat.com doesn't allow the page to be viewed in this manner (a "foreign hosts not allowed" error page appears) so I'll try copying and translating some of the text lines individually. The forum page has some rare, troubling shots of the Chernobyl "firemen" shoveling buring reactor debris, and so forth. Interesting viewing.

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