Soviet Official Says 49,000 Were Evacuated

About 49,000 people were evacuated from the area around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and between 20 and 25 people are critically ill as a result of the fire at the reactor, a senior Soviet official said Saturday.

Moscow’s Communist Party chief Boris N. Yeltsin said in an interview that perhaps as many as 40 people may have received a serious dose of radiation “but definitely not hundreds or thousands as reported by the Western press.”

The Soviet government has said that just two people were killed and 197 people were injured, 18 seriously, in the nuclear plant disaster last weekend. On Saturday, the official Cuban news agency, Prensa Latina, said the two people killed were workers at the plant.

About 200 of the 49,000 people living in the Chernobyl area have suffered from radiation poisoning but the “vast majority of them will be released from hospitals shortly,” Yeltsin said, adding that the number of critically ill people is not likely to increase.

The 49,000 people who were evacuated after the disaster will not be able to return to their homes in the near future, he said, but added, “It will not take years for them to return.”

Troops in Area

There are people still living in the exclusion zone, but these are mainly military personnel guarding factories, public buildings and also private property. They are wearing protective clothing at all times, he said.

Yeltsin, in Hamburg for a West German Communist Party congress, said that outside the 19-mile exclusion zone around the accident site “life continues normally and there are no restrictions on buying milk, fruit and vegetables.”

There is also no problem with drinking water outside that zone, he said. In an interview on West German television on Friday, Yeltsin said that drinking water reservoirs in the exclusion zone had been contaminated.

The 55-year-old Yeltsin is a relatively new member of the Soviet leadership. He was appointed Moscow party boss last December by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, replacing Viktor V. Grishin, 71. Yeltsin was elevated to non-voting membership in the ruling Politburo last February.

Before taking the Moscow party post, Yeltsin served as Central Committee secretary in charge of construction and energy.

On Friday, Yeltsin--the only ranking Soviet official to provide firm details on the accident--said the fire at the nuclear plant was largely extinguished but still smoldering.

He added that Soviet Army units extinguished the blaze by using helicopters to dump sand, lead and the neutron-absorbing element boron on the site.