Exactly three decades ago, an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine sent a radioactive cloud across Europe. Within weeks, nearly 100,000 people who lived in a large zone surrounding the disaster site had been evacuated, never to return to the poisoned land.
Today, the relics of their past — hollowed-out hotels, empty swimming pools, crumbling farming villages and oxidized ferris wheels — stand in ghostly abandonment across a contaminated region larger than Rhode Island.
Some former residents returned to the area, now derelict and overgrown, ahead of the anniversary.
Zoya Perevozchenko, 66, had lived in Pripyat, the town inhabited by Chernobyl workers which was abandoned in the wake of the accident.
She told Reuters news agency: "I barely found my apartment, I mean it's a forest now - trees growing through the pavement, on the roofs. All the rooms are empty, the glass is gone from the windows and everything's destroyed."
Levels of radioactivity remain high in the surrounding area. A charity, Bridges to Belarus, is warning that a number of babies in a region close to Ukraine's border are still being born with serious deformities, while an unusually high rate of people have rare forms of cancer.
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