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Forest fires that have occurred for several days in northern Ukraine are now just a few kilometers from the abandoned Chernobyl nuclear power plant, according to sources.
Tour operator Yaroslav Emelianenko said flames had struck the abandoned city of Pripyat, which used to serve the plant.
The fire, according to him, is about 2 kilometers from the place where the most dangerous waste from the plant is stored.
- The tragic Chernobyl numbers covered by the Soviets now stand out
Greenpeace said the fire was much larger than authorities had indicated.
A representative of the Russian branch of the NGO, in an interview with Reuters, said that the largest fire reached an area of 34,000 hectares, while a second, just one kilometer from the old plant, covered an area of 12,000 hectares.
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the city of Pripyat have been abandoned since 1986, when reactor number 4 of the plant exploded.
Emelianenko also said that if the fire hit Pripyat it would be an economic disaster, as guided tours are a considerable source of income for the region.
In 2018, more than 70 thousand people visited the city. Last year, those numbers were even higher, thanks to the success of the HBO series on disasters.
Firewalls around the plant
Police said the fire started on April 4, after a man set fire to the dry grass near the exclusion zone. Since then, the flames have been approaching the old plant.
More than 300 firefighters with dozens of special equipment are working to fight the fire at the site, while six helicopters and planes are trying to put out the fire from above.
Kateryna Pavlova, president of the agency that manages the plant’s exclusion zone, told the Associated Press that “it is not possible to say that the fire is under control.”
“We worked all night, digging firewalls around the plant to protect it from fire,” he said.
On April 5, Yegor Firsov, director of the Ukrainian state ecological inspection service, said in a Facebook post that radiation levels in the area had risen above normal.
Government officials later denied the claim, arguing that the radioactive levels in the area were “within normal limits.” After that Firsov also reversed his statement.
Now, the smoke from the fire is moving towards the capital, Kiev.
The Chernobyl explosion created a radioactive cloud that passed through much of Europe, with the area around the plant being the most affected.
People are prohibited from living within 30 km from the plant.
Despite the disaster, Chernobyl continued to generate power until the last operational reactor was finally shut down in the 2000s.
Viktor Sushko, deputy director general of the National Center for Radiation Medical Research, describes the Chernobyl disaster as the “greatest man-made disaster in human history.”
The agency estimates that around 5 million citizens of the former Soviet Union, including 3 million in Ukraine, were affected by the Chernobyl disaster. In Belarus, another 800,000 people were also affected by radiation.
Currently, the Ukrainian government pays pensions to 36,525 widows of men considered victims of the accident.
In January 2018, 1.8 million people in Ukraine, including 377,589 children, had the status of victims of the disaster, according to Sushko.
There was a rapid increase in the number of people with disabilities among this population, from 40,106 in 1995 to 107,115 in 2018.
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