Chernobyl was the scene of one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters.
In the aftermath, an entire city was abandoned and several vehicles left behind.
And there’s a chilling reason why they decided to ‘park’ these cars in a vast vehicle cemetery just outside the city.
READ MORE: China’s own Hyperloop breaks its own record hitting more than 623 km/h
On April 26, 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded.
If this happened today, it’d be all over the news, and social media, in a second.
Experts, both real ones and self-proclaimed ones, would take to X to explain what must be done.
They’d be interviewed by major news outlets and call out the authorities if a rescue plan isn’t organized within hours.
But back then, it didn’t exactly work like that.
At the time, Chernobyl was part of the USSR and authorities were slow to realize, or perhaps accept, that nothing could be salvaged, and the disaster couldn’t be swept under the carpet.
Not even using every trick in the USSR’s extensive book of propaganda.
When the evacuation started, vehicles of all kinds rushed to the city of Chernobyl and the neighboring city of Pripyat.
Fire trucks, ambulance vans, first responder vehicles, and even tanks.
They did what they could, and when the dust settled, they realized they had no idea what to do with the vehicles they’d used.
In an attempt to protect themselves and other people from further contamination, they came up with a drastic solution.
So what they did was, they simply left them all behind along with other vehicles that Chernobyl residents were using.
Interestingly, those vehicles, which were parked in a large field just outside Chernobyl, now form what is essentially an open-air graveyard.
It’s like a museum, in a way, and it’s actually part of the guided tour that takes visitors to Chernobyl.
Of course, this isn’t the only car graveyard in the world.
We constantly uncover new ones, whose origins are generally unclear.
However, because history has a cruel and at the same time ironic way of writing itself, we know exactly what the origin of this particular car cemetery is.
