Chernobyl beset with wildfires on nuclear disaster’s 34th anniversary
More than 1,000 firefighters were working in the radiation-contaminated Chernobyl exclusion zone on Sunday, the 34th anniversary of the nuclear disaster, amid a weeks-long effort to extinguish brush fires in the area.
“The fire damage is terrible, 11,500 hectares,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement after meeting with firefighters. He described their efforts as heroic and presented medals to 22 of them.
Authorities have attributed the fires – which struck the predominantly uninhabited Chernobyl zone and other parts of Ukraine in recent weeks – to strong winds and abnormally dry conditions after a winter that lacked significant snow cover.
Firefighters in the Chernobyl zone, who have been in action for the past three weeks, were focusing on Sunday on “containment of two cells” of smouldering trees and brush, the State Emergency Service said in a statement.
Environmental experts have feared that such fires could stir up radioactive ash, potentially blowing contamination-laden smoke to the capital, Kiev, about 100 kilometres south of the devastated Chernobyl power plant.
Federal authorities have attributed smoky air in Kiev in recent days to fires in the nearby Zhytomyr region, but have assured that radiation levels in Kiev are within an acceptable range.
Background radiation in Kiev is “stable” and does “not exceed the permissible values,” the State Emergency Service noted on Sunday, echoing an assessment it has made during the past week.
A senior environmental official, Egor Firsov, had said, as the fires began earlier this month, that radiation in the Chernobyl zone was detected at 16 times higher than normal background levels.
The 1986 reactor meltdown and explosion at Chernobyl is widely considered the worst nuclear disaster in history. Dozens of people, particularly firefighters and other first responders, died as a direct result of the disaster.
“On this day we bow our heads to the blessed memory of those heroes who saved the future from the danger of radiation,” Zelensky said in a statement for the anniversary.
He also expressed “deep respect” for the firefighters and others currently working in the zone to “protect these lands from new natural disasters.”
Authorities have assured that the current fires have not posed a risk for the critical structures at the Chernobyl disaster site, particularly a steel and cement containment shell covering the destroyed reactor area.
Zelensky visited the Chernobyl site on Sunday, laying a bouquet of flowers at a memorial and observing a moment of silence.
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“The Chernobyl disaster is, without exaggeration, a disaster on a global scale,” Zelensky said in a speech.
The disaster serves as a bitter lesson of the recent past and also a warning for the future, he said. “Planet Earth is the home of all mankind, and its preservation is the responsibility of every person and the common duty of all nations.” (dpa)
