One of the most terrible places in the entire Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is not at all dumps of abandoned equipment, not empty apartments of Pripyat, and not even the Chernobyl nuclear power plant itself. This place is a small basement in the Pripyat medical unit No. 126, located under one of the hospital buildings. Tourists are never taken to this basement, and during ordinary sightseeing trips to the city they don't even talk about it, so that no one has an idea to get there.
The basement itself is a narrow corridor about 60-70 meters long, along the walls of which there are heating and water supply pipes, and there are also several side rooms - all of them with an area of no more than 10-15 square meters. What's so creepy about this basement? And why can't you go there under any circumstances?
Pripyat medical unit No. 126 is notorious for the fact that it was there that firefighters who extinguished Unit 4 on the night of April 26, 1986, as well as injured workers of the station, were taken there for first aid. Almost all the firefighters from the crews of Lieutenant Kibenok and Lieutenant Pravik, who heroically extinguished the fire at the nuclear power plant that night, died within the next two weeks, as they received doses of radiation of several thousand rem - which is several times higher than the dose of 500 rem, which is already lethal … It is impossible even to imagine what the body of a person who has received such a dose turns into - it literally "glows" with radiation, transmits radiation to everything it touches.
That night, upon admission to the hospital, the firefighters were first stripped - since their clothes, in fact, were no longer fabric, but "solid radioactive waste", and then they threw their clothes into the basement of the hospital building where the firefighters lay. I think this was the most correct decision at that time - there were simply no places in the city where these clothes would not pose a danger. The firefighters were supposed to change clothes at the NPP sanitary inspection room, but it turned out to be closed that night - and everything had to be done right in the hospital.
All the things of the firemen are still in the hospital basement.
The entrance to the basement is a rather mundane concrete staircase with welded metal railings in the style of the seventies, on the platform of which some iron and empty boxes of milk bottles are lying. The basement itself is quite small, this is such a long corridor, under the ceiling of which there are heating pipes wrapped in thermal insulation.
Promotional video:
Here's another shot. There are some metal cylinders lying on the floor, and on the left you can see the entrance to one of the side rooms.
Inside one of the rooms, there are metal hospital cabinets, racks and other equipment.
Inside several others are the same clothes of firefighters and station personnel. Already at the entrance to the room, the dosimeter shows a background of several tens of thousands of microroentgens per hour.
Somewhere on the upper floors of the hospital, a firemen's comforter is lying around, "shining" with a background of 80,000 microroentgens per hour. And here are the boots of firefighters in the photo:
What is the maximum background you can intend in the basement? According to stalkers who visited the basement, the floor in some parts of the basement "shines" up to 1-2 X-rays per hour, which is about one hundred to two hundred thousand times higher than normal, and these levels are really dangerous to health. In addition to high levels, the very source of radiation pollution in the basement is very "bad" - it is fine and extremely radioactive dust and particles of fuel from the Fourth Reactor, in this basement everything is literally soaked in it, dust and particles fly in the air, neither a gas mask nor especially a respirator-petal.
It’s funny and at the same time scary to me to watch a video of how “stalkers” in paper petals on their nose and plastic shoe covers on their feet descend into this basement - all this does not protect against micro-dust, in which literally the entire bottom line of the periodic table is present - cesium, strontium, pltutonium, americium and further down the list.
In general, if you are in Pripyat, never go to the basement of the hospital - unlike other places in the ChEZ, embellished with radio-phobic bikes, this is a really dangerous place. You can go down there only in a very expensive professional spacesuit with a closed breathing cycle.
But better - not at all necessary.