A Mil Mi-6 aboandoned in Chernobyl

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YalsonKSA@reddit

Probably highly radioactive, or at least was at one point. The helicopters that were used to dump material on the reactor core and all of the vehicles used in the immediate containment measures were later parked up in secure compounds and left to rot, as they hey were too radioactive to be used. There was a great photo article on the BBC about them a while back, but I don't know if it is still up. I used a picture from that article of the weathered red star on the side of an Mi-8 on a record sleeve a while ago.

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Duckbilling2@reddit

https://youtu.be/9McvXC-U1Mo?T=7m0s

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Professor_Smartax@reddit

Couldn't you just wash the fallout off of metal?

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YalsonKSA@reddit

Well, kinda. The problem is that the particles involved tend to be a) very difficult to get rid of and b) very, VERY radioactive. And cleaning the machinery still exposes the people doing it to extremely dangerous conditions (which the Soviet Union was admittedly less bothered with) and even if you can wash the dust off, where is it going to go? Into the environment? The water table? There is the risk that cleaning the helicopters and trucks off will simply spread the contamination over a wider area and kill many more people. So the Soviet Union took the decision to just park the machines up in (supposedly) secure compounds and let nature take its course. It wasn't a very good solution, but it was probably the best of a lot of bad options. It also didn't take account of the tendency of unattended things in the area to disappear due to corruption, desperation or a combination of both.

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Professor_Smartax@reddit

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Arguably, since they were going to abandon that area anyway, they could do the wash and then fly it away, but I wouldn't want to fly in it and find out later I got cancer because the cleaners missed a spot.

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Sivalon@reddit

That may be true, but it didn’t stop someone from stripping out virtually everything they could. Avionics, engines, landing gear, some of the rotor blades perhaps. Looks like the airframe and transmission are left.

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YalsonKSA@reddit

This BBC article explains that despite the risk of radioactivity, a lot of material was looted from the vehicle parks for spare parts after the disaster. I even heard stories of helicopter parts up to and including engines being removed and stolen by organised criminal gangs so they could be sold back to the cash-strapped post-Soviet Russian air force. The level of corruption after the collapse was so extraordinary it would not surprise me if there were a few Mi-8s being used by the Russians now in the Ukraine theatre that had engines that came from the Chernobyl helicopter park.

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