1/ I'd like to take a few minutes of your time for a thread on Chernobyl and Pripyat, as today is the 34th anniversary of the nuclear disaster there - an event that changed thousands of lives and rendered an entire city uninhabitable.

2/ The disaster itself has been covered in so many ways by people who can do a much better job than I could - HBO's Chernobyl series and @HigginbothamA's Midnight In Chernobyl are great starting points - but what I can speak to is what it is now, and what visiting it meant to me.

3/ Chernobyl is somewhere I'd wanted to photograph for decades - how could I not, as someone who seeks out ruins? - but it was hard to take joy in the accomplishment when confronting the enormity of the disaster firsthand. There's really nothing that can convey it.

4/ Pripyat, the city next to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, is larger than you could ever imagine. Knowing it is an entire abandoned city doesn't convey the scale, and without the scale it's hard to comprehend the loss. It's also a place we have many misconceptions about.

5/ The biggest misconception is that the entire area is dead and gray, when in fact nature is thriving and eerily beautiful. The small town of Chernobyl was, up until recently, home to somewhere between 1500-300 people, and many more commute from Slavutych each day.

6/ This is because up until 2000 the power plant was still in use - Reactor 4 melted down but 1-3 were still active - and the current process of decommissioning the plant will take until 2065. It's an enormous project and a lot of people are hard at work on it.

7/ We think of the exclusion zone as a dead area but hundreds of people commute via train there daily to work at the plant. There are hostels & a general store in Chernobyl. At the gate there is a gift shop with t-shirts so you can brag about what a badass you are to have gone

8/ There were a LOT of tour groups there, with the same problems as many tragic sites that have become tourist attractions - namely, a lack of respect for the magnitude of what occurred there and a sense of humility in the face of that tragedy.

9/ As with many abandoned sites, a lot of people think it's just a playground, a way to show off how edgy they are for having gone somewhere scary. But the real horror of the site is so much more profound than the schlocky b-movie approach people have towards fear.

10/ Abandoned places are dark and creepy, yes. But they're also reminders of our own mortality, and of everything we create. They show that our best intentions can backfire, that disaster has no warning for many, that fate cares little for plans. They show we are weak and small.

11/ They show that you might have to stockpile gas masks for kids in case of a war, and they show that those precautions are useless when you've accidentally rendered thousands of acres permanently uninhabitable with radiation

12/ I grew up near Harrisburg, PA and was a baby when the Three Mile Island incident occurred. This could have been my towns, my villages. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is 1004 miles. If the winds were blowing the wrong way, what would have become of Philadelphia or NYC?

13/ With hindsight we see disasters as inevitable but to the people who built Pripyat in 1970, it was a modern city of art, hope, science - a place to be proud of. We see it as ruins, but to the residents it was a home - a surprisingly nice one with more love than you'd think.

14/ Most of the residents were younger families working for the plant - young families with kids, so there are tons of well-equipped schools - places to learn music, art, philosophy, medicine. We think of Pripyat as a ruin, but it was once vibrant and full of life.

15/ It was stolen from so many of these people by an incident beyond their control. We shudder at the wrecked face of an old doll, but the when whole thousands of toys showed how deeply the children were loved - and that love and hope didn't stop what was coming.

16/ Now Pripyat is, to many of those who visit, a dark amusement park of sorts - it's bragging rights, a place to gawk at, a check mark on an "I'm different!" scorecard. Those who live there don't understand why people come from so far to see it, because to them it's a corpse

17/ Over the past month wildfires have been tearing through the exclusion zone destroying many historical sites and villages. They're still not out. Each day they erase a bit more of the remains of something that is so important yet so poorly understood. https://twitter.com/abandonedameric/status/1249726065012019207

18/ Some day it will be gone, lost to the realm of ghost stories and urban legends, and the ability to see not only that it is real but that it was once alive will be gone. It could have been your town. It could have been your home. That's why it's scary, and why it matters.

19/ There's so much more I have to say, and so much more I don't yet know how to - but 34 years later, I mourn for the loss of the people of Ukraine - from the disaster and from the fires wiping out what's left. They didn't deserve this. Nobody does.

20/ If you'd like to see the rest of what I have at the moment from Chernobyl, you can visit the gallery on my website here. I'm slowly plugging away at adding images & info, and will be doing more as time goes on. Thanks for taking the time to read this. https://www.abandonedamerica.us/chernobyl-pripyat

21/ Sorry if this was a bit of a ramble, it's just been in my heart a lot the last month - because of the fires, because I would have been there today if not for the COVID stuff, because I'm still trying to process both the photos and emotions from it.