At the center of one of the world’s worst man-made ecological disasters — the now almost nonexistent Aral Sea, a dusty, forbidding graveyard for beached ships — is one of the world’s deadliest islands. Vozrozhdeniya Island, as it’s actually called, or Anthrax Island, as it’s more colloquially known, is the site of a former Soviet bio-weapons testing site, which was abandoned (along with the town that surrounded it, which once housed some thousands of bio-weapons workers and their families) in the 90s after more than 50 years of open-air testing of nasty things like plague, Ebola virus and Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis. They were tested on animals and birds which were supposedly downwind from the town — though there must have been some unexpected changes in the breeze once in a while — and supposedly there are leaking vats of notoriously long-lasting anthrax buried around the island (no one knows exactly how many or exactly where).
As horrible as that all sounds to most of us, to some, it’s irresistible — the combination of a mysterious facility and an abandoned ghost town all housed on a forbidding island which is itself in the midst of a vast man-made wasteland was apparently so cool that one British TV host couldn’t resist going — and bringing his camera crew with him. This fascinating 10-minute video documents his day-trip to this bizarre place, and it’s pretty darn cool.
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So that’s where the band ended up…I loved their stuff!
posted by Kevin Swaluk on 2-6-2009 at 10:01 am
Seems like they might have been playing up the danger of the island a little bit. Flipping through their dictionary looking for synonyms for evil and dangerous.
posted by Brad on 2-6-2009 at 10:06 am
They don’t have on gloves, do they? Nor hair covers…
Any bacteria etc that became lodged in their hair, have now been washed into the Aral Sea! Talk about more potential pollution!
Scary…
posted by ariaDne on 2-6-2009 at 10:49 am
When I saw the headline for this post, the first thing that came to mind was the scene in “Silence of the Lambs” where Clarice promises Hannibal Lecter that if he helps the FBI find Buffalo Bill, he’ll get a transfer to a Tennessee prison and an annual vacation on Plum Island, which happens to be the home of an animal disease research center. Later, after Hannibal learns the offer was bogus, he asks Clarice about “Anthrax Island.”
posted by Paul on 2-6-2009 at 11:52 am
This weapons site is the focus of a book called “Biohazard” By Ken Alibek. He was Heading the research division of the facility. He defected to the US and wrote the memoirs. Its really amazing reading some truely frightening things happened there. Check it out.
posted by Robert on 2-6-2009 at 12:10 pm
While I agree that this place sounds horrible, some quick research turns up:
“Brian Hayes, a biochemical engineer with the United States Department of Defense’s Threat Reduction Agency, led an expedition in the spring and summer of 2002 to neutralize what was probably the world’s largest anthrax dumping grounds. His team of 113 people neutralized between 100 and 200 tons of anthrax over a three-month period. The cost of the cleanup operation was approximately $5,000,000.”
Granted, that’s from Wikipedia, but if this info is on there, then image what else our government did about this that is classified and isn’t public knowledge.
posted by Toes14 on 2-7-2009 at 12:52 am