It was later purchased by Mitsubishi, which built some of the world’s first multi-story, reinforced concrete buildings to house its bursting population. The small island off the coast of Nagasaki was first settled in 1887 as a coal mining colony. Today, Hashima Island is a vacant labyrinth of crumbling concrete, sea walls and deserted buildings, yet it was once among the most densely populated places on the planet. The ruined buildings of Hashima, famous as the nickname "Gunkan jima (Warship Island)", are seen on Jin Nagasaki, Japan. The site is also home to a museum, which holds a collection of relics and mementos recovered from the rubble. The facades of dozens of brick buildings and charred storefronts still remain, as well as graveyards of rusted cars and bicycles, scattered sewing machines and unused tram tracks. Only a handful of people managed to survive by playing dead and later fleeing to the forest.Ī new Oradour-sur-Glane was built nearby after the war ended, but French President Charles de Gaulle ordered that the burned-out ruins of the old town be left untouched as a monument to the victims. The men were taken to barns and machine-gunned, and the women and children were locked in a church and killed with explosives and incendiary grenades. In what is believed to have been an act of revenge for the town’s supposed support of the French Resistance, a Nazi Waffen SS detachment rounded up and murdered 642 of its residents and burned most of their houses to the ground. On the afternoon of June 10, 1944, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane was the scene of one of the worst massacres of French civilians during World War II. Ruins of the martyred village Oradour-sur-Glane, photographed in 2014. While radiation levels in Pripyat have dropped enough in recent years to allow urban explorers and former residents to make brief visits, scientists estimate that it could take several centuries before the town is once again safe for habitation. In the town post office, hundreds of letters from 1986 still sit waiting to be mailed. Its buildings have decayed and been partially reclaimed by the elements, and wild animals roam through what were once bustling apartments, sports complexes and an amusement park. The city has since languished for nearly three decades as a chilling reminder of the disaster. Soviet authorities later sealed off an 18-mile exclusion zone surrounding Chernobyl, leaving Pripyat an abandoned ghost town. ![]() It took 36 hours before the town’s 49,000 residents were evacuated, and many later suffered severe health effects as a result of their brief exposure to the fallout. ![]() The explosion that followed sent flames and radioactive material soaring into the skies over Pripyat, a nearby city built to house the plant’s scientists and workers. on April 26, 1986, a catastrophic meltdown took place inside reactor number four at the Soviet nuclear power plant at Chernobyl. The city lies in the inner exclusion zone around Chernobyl where hot spots of persistently high levels of radiation make the area uninhabitable for thousands of years to come.Īt 1:23 a.m. Students chairs stand on rotting floorboards in an auditorium of an abandoned school on Septemin Pripyat, Ukraine.
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