Watch This Spooky Video Of Chernobyl Disaster Ghost Town

Nearly thirty years ago, the Chernobyl disaster led to the abandonment of nearby Pripyat, Ukraine. Close to 50,000 people evacuated the town after an explosion on April 26, 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant released radiation into the area and created an unlivable situation.

Thanks to Danny Cooke, a British cinematographer working on a segment for 60 Minutes, a new video is making the rounds on the Internet that offers a haunting look at the empty city of Pripyat from the perspective of an aerial drone. It shows a city frozen in time, taken over by trees and almost post-apocalyptic. There are no people anymore – Pripyat is a city inhabited only by vegetation and haunting memories.

“Chernobyl is one of the most interesting and dangerous places I’ve been,” Cooke writes on his web site. “I can’t imagine how terrifying it would have been for the hundreds of thousands of locals who evacuated.”

He added that he found “something serene, yet highly disturbing about this place.”

The 60 Minutes segment looked at the continuing threat the reactor poses decades after the Chernobyl disaster and the underfunded project to permanently seal it.

“It’s an engineering effort the likes of which the world has never seen,” CBS News’ Bob Simon reported. “With funds from over 40 different countries, 1,400 workers are building a giant arch to cover the damaged reactor like a casserole. It will be taller than the State of Liberty and wider than Yankee Stadium – the largest movable structure on Earth.”

Even today, radiation is such a concern “that workers have to construct the arch nearly a thousand feet away, shielded by a massive concrete wall.”

Three decades after the Chernobyl disaster, Pripyat itself remains abandoned, but radiation levels have dipped to low enough levels that tourists and others have explored the area (although trips can only be short). Some nearby villages include residents who refused to evacuate despite being in the so-called “Zone of Alienation” that extends for 20 miles around the reactor.

[photo credit: Stuck in Customs]

Watch This Spooky Video Of Chernobyl Disaster Ghost Town