Dangerously unfit for human habitation, a number of settlements around the world remain strictly off-limits, ranging from once-thriving cities contaminated with radiation to desolate villages riddled with asbestos, anthrax and explosives. Grab your hazmat suit and click or scroll on to take a tour of the world's most toxic towns.

Prior to February 2023, East Palestine was a sleepy village in Columbiana County, Ohio—a world away from the international spotlight. A community of some 4,761 encompassing just over three square miles, it was founded in 1828 and today comprises a high street, park and residential neighbourhoods. However, the village's peaceful anonymity was shattered when a disaster devastated the close-knit settlement, leaving locals feeling unsafe in their own homes...

On 3 February 2023, a Norfolk Southern cargo train travelling to Conway, Pennsylvania suffered a mechanical problem and derailed as it passed through East Palestine. Around 50 cars came off the tracks and burst into flames, and while no one was injured in the initial aftermath of the incident, the contents of the train were cause for extreme concern. 11 of the cars were carrying hazardous materials and first responders discovered that one of the train cars was releasing vinyl chloride, used to make PVC, into the atmosphere. A known carcinogen, exposure to the chemical can reportedly lead to health issues ranging from headaches and nausea to more serious, long-term illnesses such as liver cancer.

Two days after the incident on 5 February, evacuation orders were given to hundreds of residents near the site of the derailment. Given the cocktail of hazardous materials aboard the train, a potential explosion could send shrapnel into many of East Palestine's residential neighbourhoods. Ohio governor Mike DeWine urged reluctant locals to relocate: "You need to leave, you just need to leave. This is a matter of life and death," he told the community. 

Once nearby residents had been evacuated, work crews carried out a controlled burn on 6 February to avert the risk of a devastating explosion. Toxic chemicals, including vinyl chloride, were slowly released into the air from five rail cars. Other potentially harmful substances, including butyl acrylate, benzene and ethyl hexyl acrylate, were also present on the train, though it's thought that vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate were the main chemicals released. As the hazardous materials burned, a dark plume of smoke was seen rising ominously over East Palestine, dominating the horizon. 

The charred remains of tanker cars from the 150-carriage freight train can be seen here littering the railroad tracks on 14 February. According to officials, the controlled detonation of the chemicals was a success. The affected cars were then moved to a safe location for further examination by the National Transportation Safety Board. On 8 February, the evacuation order was lifted after air and water samples reportedly found that East Palestine was no longer at risk. Yet when residents flocked back to their homes, it was definitely not business as usual in the small community.

Michael Regan, the chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, reassured returning residents that the village was habitable: "All families need to know that they are safe,” he told them. Yet despite assurances from authorities, locals are unnerved by the chemical odour that still lingers in the air. Guidance from officials has been contradictory too—while the municipal water was deemed safe to drink, residents were also advised to buy bottled water as a precaution by Ohio governor Mike DeWine. What's more, in the days following the derailment, some members of the public reported experiencing lingering headaches and rashes after showering. 

Videos surfaced across social media reportedly capturing the shimmering, iridescent surfaces of creeks across the village, likely slicks of vinyl chloride according to expert sources from USA Today. Pictured here on 16 February, a clean-up crew extracts contaminated water from a stream in the village. Temporary dams have been placed across a number of creeks to help contain the chemicals, which are then removed from the water with industrial pumps. The chemical release has seemingly been devastating for the local ecosystem, and according to authorities, around 3,500 fish have died in nearby waterways. Meanwhile, a new federal lawsuit brought by three East Palestine residents is claiming that fish and other wildlife are dying up to 20 miles from the site of the derailment and controlled burn. 

Here, an air quality monitor hangs from a stop sign on a residential street in East Palestine. At least seven lawsuits have been filed against transport company Norfolk Southern since the disaster. One of the complaints alleges that the crash and subsequent burn released over 1.1 million pounds of vinyl chloride into the environment. It also alleges that when vinyl chloride is burnt, phosgene gas is created—a substance used in chemical warfare in the First World War and prohibited by the Geneva Convention. 

Attorney John Morgan from Morgan & Morgan, a personal injury firm behind one of the lawsuits, said: "Residents exposed to vinyl chloride may already be undergoing DNA mutations that could linger for years or even decades before manifesting as terrible and deadly cancers. The lawsuit alleges that Norfolk Southern made it worse by essentially blasting the town with chemicals as they focused on restoring train service and protecting their shareholders.” Local resident Joshua Barber is one of those affected by the catastrophic derailment. He's pictured here returning home with bottles of water from a donation bank in East Palestine, while his sister, Jessica Fosnaught, works on her laptop with her young niece on her hip.

Joshua's father, Jerry Barber, changes a furnace filter in the house after picking up free filters from a donation bank. Anger and mistrust are rife amongst worried residents, reinforced by contradictions in the supposed guidance. Speaking to The Guardian, another resident, Jami Cozza, said: “People are just angry but they don’t know who to be angry with because we’re not getting enough information to know who to be mad at.” Cozza added: “‘The air is fine, but don’t go outside. Your water is fine, but drink bottled water.’ You can’t trust them.”

 An air purifier is pictured here in the Barbers' living room on 17 February. In addition to headaches and rashes, some locals have reportedly developed sore throats and nausea since returning to the village too, raising questions about the validity of the air test results. A community meeting was scheduled on Wednesday 15 February to discuss health and safety concerns, but representatives from rail firm Norfolk Southern, who owned the derailed train, failed to show up, stoking more frustration among local residents. The company says it has donated $1.5 million (£1.2m) to help residents and businesses and is establishing a $1 million (£831k) fund for the community to help monitor the air quality. 

According to The Guardian, the situation appears to be worsening for locals. People in the community have reported the sudden deaths of their pets, while others have noticed that the outdoor cats and birds they used to feed have seemingly disappeared since the chemical spill. Even Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown said residents are "right to be sceptical" about assurances from officials, in an interview with CNN. Less than two weeks after the East Palestine disaster, another Norfolk Southern train derailed on 16 February, though no hazardous materials were present.

Perched on a steep cliff above Eagle River in Eagle County, Colorado, the ghost town of Gilman was established in 1886 during the Colorado Silver Boom and had a population of several hundred by the early 20th century. The nearby Eagle Mine was the state's leading producer of silver for decades, but by the early 1930s, the mainstay of the town's economy was zinc and lead mining.

The population of the town, which had a post office, grocery store and even a bowling alley, remained at several hundred up until 1977 when the main mine ceased operations. The town was eventually abandoned in 1984 by order of the Environmental Protection Agency, which detected dangerous levels of contaminants in soil and groundwater.

Parts of Gilman remain toxic to this day, including the old mine. It has noxious levels of arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead and zinc. A proposal to fast-track clean-up operations and transform the site into a ski resort fell through in 2009. The town, which is privately owned and sprawls over 235 acres, has been allowed to fall into rack and ruin.

The majority of Gilman's structures, many of which have historical value, have been vandalised, so much so that almost every window in the town has been broken. Though strictly off-limits to the general public, Gilman has become a haven for explorers and photographers, as well as graffiti artists and vandals.

As the war in Ukraine has captured the world's attention, a nuclear catastrophe made the region infamous nearly 40 years ago. Pripyat in northern Ukraine was founded in 1970 to house the workers of the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant along with their families. Declared a city in 1979, Pripyat had a population of 47,500 according to a 1985 census, and all the trappings of a major urban area, including 160 apartment blocks, 25 stores and malls, five secondary schools, a hospital, cinema and more.

Then the world's worst nuclear disaster occurred at the plant on 26 April 1986, when Reactor 4 exploded, spewing clouds of toxic fallout over the city and across large swathes of Europe. Following the cataclysmic accident, it took 36 hours to evacuate Pripyat's entire population, exposing many residents to dangerous levels of radiation. Most personal belongings were left behind and remain in the city to this day.

An exclusion zone was established in the vicinity and is currently still in place, though it has expanded to cover 1,000 square miles. Frozen in time, Pripyat is now one of the world's most chilling ghost towns. According to a 2016 study by Greenpeace, the immediate area around the plant won't be fit for human habitation for a staggering 3,000 years.

After the evacuation, the former city became a 'dark tourism' magnet—tourists could visit as long as they didn't hang around—as well as a haven for wildlife. Shown here, nature is reclaiming the crumbling concrete structures, with animals such as wolves, bears, foxes and deer spotted roaming Pripyat's once-busy streets. However, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the eerily empty city has reportedly become a base for Ukrainian forces to train amid the abandoned buildings.

Pictured in 1981, the picture-perfect Pennsylvania coal mining town of Centralia hides a dark secret. In mysterious circumstances on 27 May 1962, the town's landfill, which was sitting atop an old strip mine, was set alight. The blaze soon spread to the deeper coal mines beneath the town and the inferno quickly spiralled out of control.

Locals only became aware of the full extent of the blaze in 1979 and it wasn't until 1981 when a resident fell into a sinkhole that the fire hit the headlines. By this time, smoke and poisonous gases were billowing from fissures that had opened up in the ground and residents had begun falling ill.

Realising the subterranean fire was out of control and almost impossible to quell, Congress allocated millions of dollars for relocation efforts in 1983. By 1990, the majority of the town's householders had been bought out, reducing the population from well over 1,000 to just 63. More than 500 properties were razed to the ground. In 2006, only a few homes remained, including this unstable row house. 

Famous for all the wrong reasons, the creepy abandoned town provided the inspiration for survival horror video game Silent Hill. These days just a handful of structures and fewer than a dozen stubborn residents remain in the condemned town, which is out of bounds to newcomers. Experts believe the hellish fire could burn for at least another 100 years.

The company town of Wittenoom in Western Australia's Pilbara region had a population of around 20,000 in the early 1960s, when the bustling spot was home to a cinema, two schools and a swish hotel, which is pictured here. The town owed its existence to a nearby blue asbestos mine that employed most of the adult residents.

As health concerns surrounding asbestos grew, the mine was shut down in 1966, but the closure came too late for many of the town's residents. To date, more than 2,000 people have died from asbestos-related diseases according to the Asbestos Diseases Society of Australia, while the mine's ex-workers are at risk of dying prematurely from asbestosis, lung cancer or mesothelioma.

Despite its deadly terrain, the town's closure wasn't announced until the late 1970s, when the State Government started buying up and demolishing properties. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the bulk of the town's structures were pulled down, and the hotel was finally bulldozed in 1996.

Regarded as the most contaminated site in the southern hemisphere, Wittenoom, which has been dubbed 'Australia's Chernobyl', was wiped off official maps and disconnected from the power grid in 2007. Three die-hard permanent residents still lived in the former town up until a few years ago, but the Western Australian government introduced a bill in March 2019 that allowed for the compulsory purchase of their properties, forcing them out for good.

The Tri-State Mining District town of Picher was established in the early 20th century around the eponymous lead and zinc mine and was incorporated in 1918. A bustling hive of activity, the town's thriving population peaked at 14,252 in 1926, but it wouldn't stay that way for long.

Mining operations declined in the latter half of the 20th century and halted in 1967. In 1972, contaminated water began to seep from the mines and efforts were made to decontaminate the town, but to little avail. By 2006, the state had begun relocating residents and buying out homes and businesses.

Adding to Picher's woes and sealing its fate, an F4 tornado hit the town in May 2008. The twister claimed the lives of eight people and levelled scores of buildings, while causing irreparable damage to countless others. Following the tornado, the majority of residents vacated the town for good.

By 2013, a large proportion of the condemned town's buildings had been demolished, while suspected arson attacks in 2015 and 2017 gutted Picher's mining museum and church. Despite the contamination, Gary Linderman, the owner of the town's Ole Miner Pharmacy, vowed to stay there until the bitter end. Picher's last official resident, he died in June 2015 and the town's population was subsequently recorded at zero.

Located downwind from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, Namie was evacuated and declared a no-go zone after a devastating earthquake and tsunami ravaged the surrounding region on the 11th March 2011, causing three catastrophic meltdowns at the plant.

Before the disaster, Namie had a population of over 20,000. Located within the 12-mile exclusion zone, the town remained completely out of bounds and eerily silent until April 2012, when the authorities divided it into three zones based on their levels of radioactive contamination.

Former residents were allowed to visit Zone A, located closest to the coast, but weren't permitted to stay overnight. They could visit Zone B for very brief periods, but Zone C, the most contaminated of the lot, remained closed off, with access strictly forbidden.

As clean-up operations have progressed, Zones A and B were declared safe in April 2017 and former residents were allowed to return, but many have chosen to stay away. Access to Zone C, on the other hand, is still completely prohibited and is expected to stay that way until at least late 2023. However, in February 2023, Namie and the surrounding region suffered a 4.9 magnitude earthquake, setting reopening efforts back somewhat.

New Idria in northern California's Diablo Mountain Range was founded in 1854 to house workers who toiled away in the adjacent mercury mine, which went on to become one of America's chief producers of the metal. By the mid-20th century, the town was a bustling community and had a number of shops, a post office, a school and a church.

The mine closed down in 1972 leading to a mass exodus of workers and their families. Its livelihood stripped away, New Idria fast became a deserted ghost town. Concerns over contamination in the area began building in the 1990s and since then, worrying levels of mercury and other toxic metals have been detected in the town and downstream of the mine.

In 2010, a fire ripped through buildings on the settlement's north side and two years later the south side of the town was fenced off. Despite this, several former residents were known to visit periodically during this time, including the last mining supervisor Mark Ward, who would travel to the site with his wife and son to repair damaged structures.

Clean-up operations were conducted in 2012 and 2015 but the site remains toxic and uninhabitable. In addition to mercury and heavy metal contaminants, a large tract of land south of New Idria has been deemed an Asbestos Hazard Area. This is one place in sunny California you definitely want to steer clear of.

Situated on Vozrozhdeniya Island, aka anthrax island, in the now dried-up Aral Sea, Kantubek was a town that housed 1,500 Soviet scientists and their families. The scientists were employees of the notorious Aralsk-7 lab complex nearby. Previously one of the world's largest biological-warfare testing facilities, the top-secret complex was operational until the early 1990s.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the entire lab complex was relocated to the city of Kirov within the newly created Russian Federation. Kantubek became a sinister ghost town and one of the most toxic on the planet. Vozrozhdeniya Island was reduced to a dumping ground for the Soviet Union's enormous cache of deadly anthrax.

Around 100 to 200 tonnes of anthrax slurry were dumped in pits there during the 1980s. After the island was abandoned, security became non-existent and governments around the world grew concerned that terrorist organisations or hostile regimes could get hold of the toxins. To deal with the problem, the US funded a multimillion-dollar clean-up operation in 2002.

The US-sponsored clean-up neutralised the vast cache of anthrax, but there are still fears over the safety of the island, which was also a testing ground for weaponised smallpox, bubonic plague and more, with locals avoiding the site at all costs.

Dating back to the early Middle Ages, the chocolate-box village of Tyneham, which is known as Dorset's 'lost' village, was requisitioned by the British Army just before Christmas of 1943 for military training, along with 7,500 acres of surrounding countryside. Pictured here is the village's quaint school.

With heavy hearts, the village's 225 inhabitants were evacuated and relocated. The last person to leave pinned a note on the door of the church requesting the Army to “treat the houses and church with care”. Needless to say, the request wasn't honoured in its entirety, with many of the buildings, including the post office, more or less reduced to ruins.

Despite reassurances that the villagers would be allowed to return to their homes after the Second World War, the Army placed a compulsory purchase order on the land in 1952 and the area continues to be used as a military training ground, though the public is allowed to visit on weekends and during the month of August.

Fortunately, the church and schoolhouse have been preserved and were converted into museums some time ago. Visitors have to take extra care though and are urged to stay on designated footpaths due to the many unexploded bombs and shells that litter the area.

Once a charming rural idyll, Geamana was situated in a deep forested valley in Transylvania's Carpathian Mountains. Home to around 400 families, their lives were turned upside down in 1977 when Romania's communist regime, led by Nicolae Ceausescu, decided to exploit the copper reserves of the nearby Rosia Poieni mine on a bewildering scale.

The valley was earmarked as a decantation basin where toxic waste from the copper mine, the biggest in Europe, could flow. Geamana's inhabitants were promised big payouts from the government, but families are said to have only received a modest patch of land miles away from their hometown and very little cash to live on.

Flooding almost all of the village, a horrifying toxic cocktail of heavy metal pollutants seeped into the valley from the late 1970s onwards, including vast quantities of pyrite, which generates highly corrosive sulphuric acid and dissolved iron when exposed to the air, poisoning soil and groundwater for miles around.

Though the clean-up of the valley was one of the pre-conditions outlined in Romania's Accession Treaty to the European Union, the company that owns the Rosia Poieni mine has done little to detoxify the area and its surroundings, and to this day, the poisonous blood red, orange and turquoise lake makes for a shocking sight and is considered one of Europe's worst ecological disasters.

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