You're reading: Bog fires spark Chernobyl fears

Officials say blazes, which sparked fears of another accident at Chernobyl last weekend, pose no threat to Ukraine

High winds carrying smoke from bog fires raging in northern Ukraine and in neighboring Belarus darkened the skies over Kyiv on May 11-12, worrying residents and foreign visitors that the cloud might have come from a new accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

After receiving more than 600 phone inquiries from people wondering about the cause of the spooky-looking haze, officials from the Emergency Situations Ministry appeared on national television May 13 to dismiss the fears.

Minister Vasyl Durdynets said there had been no accident at Chernobyl, the level of radiation was within permissible limits, while the darkened sky over Kyiv had to do with burning peat bogs in Kyiv oblast and Belarus’ Gomel region.

While firefighters had largely extinguished the blazes around Kyiv by May 14, the fires in Belarus “in no way threaten Ukraine, since they are taking place 250 to 270 kilometers” from the Ukrainian-Belarusian border, Durdynets said.

Emergency officials said no fires were burning within the so called exclusion zone, a 30-kilometer radius around Chernobyl that was most heavily polluted by the radioactive fallout from the 1986 explosion of a reactor at Chernobyl.

An Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman reiterated May 17 that the fires, which had started in the areas also contaminated by the 1986 accident, did not affect the radiation level in Kyiv.

The fires in Belarus, which covered 1,300 hectares of land, even forced the evacuation of children from several villages in the Gomel region, which borders on Kyiv oblast.

The Ukrainian Land and Resource Management Center, a U.S.-funded non-governmental organization, said satellite images of the smoke over Kyiv on May 12 showed that it had been blown in largely from Belarus, where a fire first broke out at peat processing plant in early May.

Chernobyl spokesman Serhy Pavlutsky confirmed the center’s report, saying that smoke coming from Belarus was visible from Chernobyl on May 11 and 12. However, he insisted that no fires had burned around the nuclear plant.

“Since May 12, the skies have been clear,” Pavlutsky said.

On May 15, Chernobyl engineers halved the output of the plant’s only operational reactor in order to conduct unscheduled repairs, which are expected to last through May 20.

It was not clear if the measure was related to the fires in the area.

One of Chernobyl’s four reactors exploded in April 1986 after an ill-conceived experiment, contaminating vast areas in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia with radiation.

Soviet authorities had kept silent for a week before acknowledging that Chernobyl had suffered from an unprecedented nuclear accident. Memories of those times fueled speculation among Kyivans watching the gray skies over Ukraine’s capital that the authorities might have again to hush up a new nuclear accident.

However, the public fears gradually faded away after the radiation level in Kyiv continued to stay within acceptable limits this week.

Ukraine promised to shut down Chernobyl by the end of this year pending timely provision of Western aid needed to relocate the plant’s personnel and build new energy-generating facilities so as to offset Chernobyl’s closure. Two Chernobyl reactors already have been shut down.