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A motorcycle ride thru Chernobyl area
I received this from another listserver and thought it might be of some
interest to RADSAFE members...
Joel Baumbaugh (baumbaug@nosc.mil)
>Subject: Chernobyl Motorcycle Ride Update
>
>
>
>There appears to be some controversy over the Chernobyl motorcycle ride
>website (http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/).
>
>http://www.uer.ca/forum_showthread.asp?fid=1&threadid=8951
>
>Chornobyl "Ghost Town" story is a fabrication
>e-POSHTA subscriber Mary Mycio writes:
>
>I am based in Kyiv and writing a book about Chornobyl for the Joseph Henry
>Press. Several sources have sent me links to the "Ghost Town" photo essay
>included in the last e-POSHTA mailing. Though it was full of factual
>errors, I did find the notion of lone young woman riding her motorcycle
>through the evacuated Zone of Alienation to be intriguing and asked about
>it when I visited there two days ago.
>
>I am sorry to report that much of Elena's story is not true. She did not
>travel around the zone by herself on a motorcycle. Motorcycles are banned
>in the zone, as is wandering around alone, without an escort from the zone
>administration. She made one trip there with her husband and a friend.
>They traveled in a Chornobyl car that picked them up in Kyiv.
>
>She did, however, bring a motorcycle helmet. They organized their trip
>through a Kyiv travel agency and the administration of the Chornobyl zone
>(and not her father). They were given the same standard excursion that
>most Chernobyl tourists receive. When the Web site appeared, Zone
>Administration personnel were in an uproar over who approved a motorcycle
>trip in the zone. When it turned out that the motorcycle story was an
>invention, they were even less pleased about this fantasy Web site.
>
>Because of those problems, Elena and her husband have changed the Web site
>and the story considerably in the last few days. Earlier versions of the
>narrative lied more blatantly about Elena taking lone motorcycle trips in
>the zone. That has been changed to merely suggest that she does so, which
>is still misleading.
>
>I would not normally bother to correct someone's silly Chornobyl fantasy.
>Indeed, correcting all the factual errors and falsehoods in "Ghost Town"
>would consume as much space as the Web site itself. But the motorcycle
>story was such an outrageous fiction that I thought the readers of
>e-Poshta should know.
>
>Mary Mycio, J.D. Legal Program Director
>IREX U-Media
>Shota Rustaveli St. 38b, No. 16
>Kyiv 01023, Ukraine
>Tel: (380-44) 220-6374, 228-6147 Fax: 227-7543
>
>--!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>
>ORIGINAL MESSAGE Sun, 11 Apr 2004
>A motorcycle ride thru Chernobyl area.......
>
>http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/
>
>
>Something about the author....
>Ukraine 03187 Kiev-187 Zabolotnogo 20/A Post Box 25 Elena
>
>"My dad used to say that people are afraid of a deadly thing which they
>can not see, can not feel and can not smell. Maybe that is because those
>words are a good description of death itself.
>
>"Dad is nuclear physicist, and he has educated me about many things. He is
>much more worried about the speed my bike travels than about the direction
>I point it. My trips to Chernobyl are not like a walk in the park, but the
>risk can be managed. It is similar to walking on a high wire with a
>balancing pole. One end of the pole is the gamma ray emission intensity
>and the other end of the pole is the exposure time. But the wire is also
>covered with a slippery dust, and this is the major risk.
>
>"Dad and their team have worked in the "dead zone" for last 18 years doing
>research about the day it all happened. The rest of the team is comprised
>of microbiologists, doctors, botanists and other professions with long
>names and many syllables. I was a schoolgirl back in 1986 and within a few
>hours of the accident , dad put all of us on the train to grandma's house.
>Granny lives 800 kms from here and dad wasn't sure if it was far enough
>away to keep us out of reach of the big bad wolf of a nuclear meltdown.
>.......
>"This is a credential control point, one of two dozen checkpoints that
>lead into dead zone. Special permission is required to enter the zone of
>exclusion. Mine is issued by a governmental organization. Thank You, Daddy!