More than 30,000 people were evacuated from six villages in the 10-kilometer zone near Kalynivka, a town in Vinnytsya Oblast, some 270 kilometers southwest of Kyiv, due to the enormous fire at the nearby ammunition depot that started late on Sept. 26.
The fire started shortly before 10 p.m. on Sept. 26 at the tank ammunition storage, which led to artillery shells exploding.
One woman was badly injured in the fire and taken to the Vinnytsya Central Hospital.
As of 10 a.m. on Sept. 27, the fire was still raging at the depot, which reportedly housed the second biggest stock of ammunition in Ukraine.
Fire-fighters tackled fires at four residential buildings in Kalynivka that were hit by the shells.
More than 150 fire-fighting vehicles and 690 fire-fighters, police, soldiers, and National Guard officers were deployed to the scene.
The authorities prohibited flights in a 50-kilometer zone around the depot, blocked nearby highways and railway routes, causing traffic jams, and forcing 14 trains from all over Ukraine to change their routes. Electricity and gas were cut off in the area.
The evacuated citizens of Kalynivka and the nearby villages are being housed in the central hospital and three high schools in Vinnytsya, where studies were canceled, the city council reported.
People unite
As the fire and then the speedy evacuation started, many Ukrainians who have relatives in the area were trying to get hold of them. They posted desperate messages online.
“Help me to find my grandparents, both 74 years of age, living on 18 Ukrainska Street in Kalynivka. They don’t answer their phones. I am their granddaughter from Kyiv. I am already on my way there. Please tell me where they are been evacuated to,” Inna Tkachuk wrote on Facebook.
“Help me to find my brother and his family from Pavlivka (a village near Kalynivka),” Kyrylo Skorohod wrote.
Locals immediately volunteered to help with the evacuation. They posted dozens of messages online, offering to drive people out of the affected areas and to host them in their homes. Local businesses offered to shelter people in their shops, cafes, and even saunas.
“We weren’t heroes, we were just doing what was needed to be done. And there were dozens of others like us,” wrote Vadim Pavlov from Vinnytsya, who together with two other volunteers Vitaly Pavlovsky and Alexey Ryabokon spent the night helping people leave Kalynivka.
From Left: Volunteers Vadim Pavlov, Alexey Ryabokon and Vitaly Pavlovsky pose for a photo after they helped dozens of Kalynivka residents to evacuate from the fire zone on Sept.26-Sept.27 ( photo Vadim Pavlov/Facebook
“We didn’t give up even after we were stunned by a shell that hit the ground near the house where we were picking up a woman with two children,” Pavlov wrote.
The three men kept driving back and forth to find the relatives of the people who contacted them online from other cities.
“We not only found all of them, but also picked up several dozen others,” Pavlov wrote.
Fire continues
As of 2 p.m. on Sept. 27, 10 percent of the territory of the Ministry of Defense ammunition depot near Kalynivka was still on fire, the press service of the Ukrainian Army General Staff reported on Facebook. Servicemen, however, had started working on defusing shells as the intensiveness of the explosions had decreased by 70 percent.
General Staff spokesperson Bohdan Senyk denied rumors, reported in some media, that the fire was caused by a chemical weapons explosion.
“No chemical weapon was stored in the depot near Kalynivka,” Senyk said.
More than 2,000 firefighters and military and police servicemen are involved in tackling the blaze and dealing with its aftermath, including two sapper brigades and a team of psychologists.
Cabinet offers money
During an emergency meeting on Sept. 27, the Cabinet of Ministers ordered the allocation of more than Hr 100 million ($3.8 million) from the reserve fund to combat the effects of the ammunition fire in Kalynivka.
Ukraine’s Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman has taken the situation under his personal control, it was reported.
