How insensitive can you be? Photo / Instagram, @nz.nik
How insensitive can you be? Photo / Instagram, @nz.nik
Travel influencers are causing outcry over a tasteless mixing Geiger-meters and glamour photography.
A woman has generated a large amount of fallout online over an 'insensitive' photo of herself barely covered by a Hazmat suit from inside the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone.
The Chernobyl reactor has become a surprise tourist hot spot, in the afterglow of popular television series and the coverage of novelty dark tourism destinations.
Chernobyl is on the radar of influencers. Photo / Instagram.com
However, many are uncomfortable with the slow transformation of the Ukrainian disaster site into a theme park. The 1986 reactor fire took the lives of over four thousand and affected the lives of tens of thousands of others.
The sudden tourism boom sits at odds then with the solemn memories held by locals.
Craig Mazin, the writer of the hugely successful HBO series based on the disaster urged those inspired by the show to treat the disaster with respect.
The radiation has not put off social media influencers. Photo / Instagram.com
"If you visit, please remember that a terrible tragedy occurred here," he wrote on twitter. Yet the influencers have already moved in to benefit from the exposure and newfound interest of the site as a tourism destination.
A scantily clad photo from the Instagram account @nz.nik earned withering response from comments.
The source of the fallout: Some photos are deemed 'insensitive' to survivours of the tragedy. Photo / Instagram.com, @nz.nik
"People died there in a very horrific way — have some respect," read one.
However it's not just international new media stars whose use of the Chernobyl is being called into question.
The nuclear tourism, fuelled by the success of Mazin's show has had all sorts of unforeseen consequences. According to The Washington Post there is already at least one company advertising an HBO-themed show for US$185 per person.
It seems the appeal of the site's dark history has been reignited by the popular television show. And like the mysterious atomic death that still stalks the site today, there's no knowing how long it will stick around for.
Chernobyl in numbers
The disaster that struck the town at 1:23am on the morning of April 26, 1986 would go down as one of the worst industrial incidents in history.
After the nuclear reactor fire, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine released 400 times more radiation than the Hiroshima bomb.
Not at once, like the famous mushroom cloud images of the nuclear era, but as a slow deadly seep.
More than 100,000 people were displaced by the cloud of invisible radiation.
Chernobyl locals: Some Ukrainians have returned to the site. Photo / Instagram.com
The UN estimates around 4000 people were killed by a direct result of the reactor explosion.
However, millions are thought to be still living on the area still affected by the wide spread atomic cloud that covered Europe.
Lingering radiation is not enough to scare away social media hounds. Photo / Instagram.com
Yet now, 33 years on, Chernobyl is seeing a second boom. This time it is an explosion of tourists.
Local operator Sergii Ivanchuk, director of SoloEast Travel, said the number of visitors is up 30 per cent on last year. Last year the company escorted 11,000 visitors into the nuclear exclusion zone – previously the most forbidding on the planet.
