The eerie abandoned vehicles in Chernobyl's 'dead zone'

A huge armada of vehicles were used to clean-up the radioactive aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster 40 years ago. Many of them still lie rusting inside the exclusion zone. In the early hours of Saturday 26 April 1986, a safety test at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in what is now Ukraine went horribly – almost apocalyptically – wrong. Technicians cooling off one of the Soviet power plant's four reactors during a test to simulate an accidental loss of power were unaware of a crucial design flaw in the reactor. The power spiked, causing a thermal reaction when the cooling system was offline. Components inside reactor number four ruptured, causing steam explosions and a reactor meltdown, which destroyed the reactor building. Radiation from the debris and the smoke from the reactor fire drifted across Ukraine, other states in the USSR, and eventually the furthest reaches of Northern Europe. The explosions, and the resulting radioactive cloud, caused panic around the world. But the effects were most keenly felt in the area around Chernobyl, especially the "model city" that had been bult for its technicians, Pripyat. This city of 49,000 people was surrounded by farmland and forest, do