"I barely found my apartment, I mean it's a forest now - trees growing through the pavement, on the roofs. All the rooms are empty, the glass is gone from the windows and everything's destroyed," Zoya Perevozchenko said.
Perevozchenko, 66, only realized something might be wrong that day 30 years before when her husband, Valeriy, didn't come back from his night shift as a foreman at the stricken reactor.
She left her apartment that day to look for him. "I remember thinking 'Goodness it's hot' and some people were in masks. But they didn't explain things to us straight away, it was all secret," she said.
She found her husband in a local clinic. He had received a fatal dose of radiation that had burnt the skin on his face bright red. He was airlifted to Moscow for treatment, but died 45 days later - one of the 31 to die of acute radiation sickness in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.
Now Perevozchenko and her two young daughters live in Kiev, where they moved since the explosion.
Above: Perevozchenko poses in her old apartment (left) and as old photo (right) shows her with her late husband, Valeriy, in Pripyat before the disaster.