Firefighters are still struggling to extinguish a massive blaze with two epicenters in the uninhabited buffer area within 18 miles from the Chernobyl disused nuclear plant, fended off after the nuclear disaster at its site in 1986, the Ukrainian State Emergency Service said on Monday
KIEV (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 06th April, 2020) Firefighters are still struggling to extinguish a massive blaze with two epicenters in the uninhabited buffer area within 18 miles from the Chernobyl disused nuclear plant, fended off after the nuclear disaster at its site in 1986, the Ukrainian State Emergency Service said on Monday.
On Saturday, a bushfire broke out near the northern Ukrainian town on Volodymyrivka within the Chernobyl exclusion zone some 50 miles to the capital of Kiev. The second fire started on Sunday near the Rahivka town 50 miles northwestward from the first one's hotbed.
"As of 7am [04:00 GMT] of April 6, efforts for extinguishing two fires within the zone of exclusion and unconditional alienation continue," the emergency service said.
According to the statement, the fire caused radiation spikes neither in the Kiev Region, nor in Chernobyl itself beyond the limit of 0.05 milliroentgen per hour.
The first and second blaze initially covered areas of 20 hectares (250 acres) and 5 hectares, respectively. They have now stretched to cover a cumulative area of over 100 hectares.
In April 1986, one of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant's reactors exploded, disgorging an enormous mass of contaminated nuclear particles into the air. The radioactive cloud stretched upon parts of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. The Ukrainian town of Pripyat, where the plant was located, and a 1,000-mile area around were cleared of people and locked down.
