Officials draw up plans to implode and bury town left dead after nuclear accident.
Buildings in the town of Prypiat in Kyiv region, where the Chornobyl accident occurred 26 years ago, could be blown up and buried, reads an article in the Segodnya daily newspaper.
The houses in the evacuated town pose a danger to people, as the level of radiation is still high inside them. “People should not be allowed to go enter these houses. The stairs are in critical condition due to rain, frost, and hot weather. As for [the idea of setting up] a museum there, several outstanding buildings could be saved, but the rest of the houses should be demolished,” Dmytro Bobro, the deputy head of the State Agency for the Chornobyl Zone, told the newspaper in an interview.
However, he added that the houses will not be demolished within the next two years, as this task requires proper funding, and there are more important tasks at present.
“It will cost billions. The problem is not in the demolition, but the burial of nuclear waste, which will take major funding. Anyway, the buildings will collapse by themselves in some ten years,” the official said.
The article says that the demolition of houses in the town could damage the tourist business, as tours to Prypiat are the highlights of trips to the Chornobyl Zone. The most popular buildings in Prypiat are a block of flats with the emblem of the Soviet Union on it, the Prometheus Cinema, an apartment where a loose-leaf calendar with the date of the Chornobyl disaster is hanging, the berth from which people were evacuated on hydrofoil vessels, the Enerhetyk cultural center, the Polisia Hotel, and a well-known observation wheel.
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