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Chornobyl "Ghost Town" story is a fabrication.
It interesting to note to what lengths
ideologically-motivated people will go to mislead the public.
Jerry
----- Original Message -----
From: gene
Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 12:11 PM
Subject: [MbrExchange] RE: A motorcycle ride thru Chernobyl
area From: Lance Kim <lancekim@nuc.berkeley.edu> To: gene <marc832@mindspring.com> Subject: Chernobyl Motorcycle Ride Update Lance Kim US Support Program Fellow l.kim@iaea.org Department of Safeguards (SGTS/TNS) International Atomic Energy Agency Room A2182 +43-1-2600-26437 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 -- Lance Kim US Support Program Fellow l.kim@iaea.org Department of Safeguards (SGTS/TNS) International Atomic Energy Agency Room A2182 +43-1-2600-26437 ---------------------------------------------------------------- ORIGINAL MESSAGE Sun, 11 Apr 2004 A motorcycle ride thru Chernobyl area....... Highly recommended by Gene Cramer 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! |