Soviets Cite Local Officials’ Misjudgment : Soviets Report 36-Hour Delay in Evacuations

Soviet officials blamed local experts Tuesday for misjudging the severity of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl and disclosed that mass evacuations did not start until 36 hours after the event.

In their first, carefully limited meeting with reporters since the accident, the officials sought to minimize fallout levels, and they rejected Western complaints that the Kremlin took too long to report the accident.

The officials said the incident at Chernobyl began at 1:23 a.m. (Moscow time) on Saturday, April 26. They gave no reason for making no public announcement until the following Monday evening, but they insisted that this was a “timely” notice.

Chemical Blast Cited

Boris Y. Shcherbina, a deputy premier and head of a government commission investigating the accident, said the probable cause was a “chemical explosion” while Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4 was being shut down because of an unexplained problem.

He said that when he and other members of the investigating commission assembled at the site, about 60 miles north of Kiev, they found a situation different from what had been described to them earlier.

“In the area, the local experts did not have a correct assessment of the accident,” Shcherbina told about 500 foreign and Soviet reporters. He did not elaborate, and there was no opportunity to question him on this point.

49,000 Evacuated

The evacuation of 49,000 people in a 19-mile radius around the plant began at 2 p.m. (Moscow time) on Sunday and ended less than three hours later, he said, adding that 1,100 buses were used. Only a small number of workers were left behind at the plant, he said.

“When the situation became more dangerous in two days, all workers of the city were evacuated,” he added, without explaining why the danger increased at that time.

The officials said, as they have from the outset, that only two people were killed. They also said that 204 people have been hospitalized, not 197, as reported earlier. Of these, 100 were contaminated by radiation and were flown to Moscow for special treatment, the officials said. They said 18 suffered from “heavy radiation.”

80% of Body Burned

One of the officials, Yevgeny I. Vorobyev, first deputy health minister, said that one of the two men killed “died as the result of very heavy burns, over 80% of his skin,” and the other “as a result of debris that fell on him.”

The officials reaffirmed the Soviet commitment to nuclear power and declared that the radiation threat to other countries is nonexistent.

Overall, little new information emerged from the 70-minute session. Shcherbina and Anatoly G. Kovalev, first deputy foreign minister, took up half the period reading prepared statements. Only 10 questions, six in writing and four from the floor, were allowed, and there was no opportunity for follow-up questions.

Sudden Adjournment

A groan of protest went up from the journalists when the moderator, an official of the Foreign Ministry press department, announced that “all the questions have been asked” and adjourned the news conference.

On the key question of radiation levels, there appeared to be conflicting opinions.

Shcherbina said the highest radiation readings at the reactor site now are 10 to 15 milliroentgens an hour, a drop of two to three times from maximum levels right after the blast. But Yuri S. Sedunov, deputy chief of the Meteorology and Environmental Control Committee, said that 15 milliroentgens was the maximum radiation reading at the plant since the accident happened.

Small Kiev Reading

Sedunov also said the radioactive fallout has had no effect on Moscow, about 450 miles northeast of Chernobyl, and he gave a reading for Kiev of a negligible 0.2 milliroentgens an hour.

Responding to criticism that the Soviet Union did not provide information promptly or in detail, Andronik M. Petrosyants, head of the State Committee on the Use of Atomic Energy, refuted the charge. He said the International Atomic Energy Agency was notified immediately after he learned of the accident.

But a spokesman for the IAEA has said the agency was not advised of the incident until April 29, three days afterward.

Initial Denial

When a radioactive cloud appeared over Scandinavia on April 28, Swedish officials asked the Soviet Union if any of its nuclear power plants had leaked radioactivity. Soviet authorities said no, but within hours the government announced that an accident had occurred at Chernobyl.

Information then was dribbled out in terse, vague statements until Boris N. Yeltsin, a candidate member of the Politburo who was traveling in West Germany, began providing greater detail.

Yeltsin talked of radiation readings as high as 200 roentgens an hour--a virtually fatal dose--in the immediate vicinity of the plant. He also gave the figure of 49,000 as the number evacuated from the danger zone.

Attacks on West

The first detailed accounts of the incident did not appear in Soviet newspapers until Tuesday’s editions. Overall, the state-run press has spent more time and space attacking the United States and other Western countries for stirring up a “hullabaloo” over the incident than in telling what happened at Chernobyl.

Brushing aside complaints from abroad about the slow pace of reporting on the accident, Soviet officials have accused the critics of trying to undermine the process of improving East-West relations.

Petrosyants said that radiation levels in neighboring countries and in Western Europe have increased to five times normal levels, but he added that Soviet experts do not think there is any threat to public health in those countries.

“Such phenomena are of a temporary nature,” Sedunov said.

The United States and other countries have complained that the Soviet government has still not provided precise scientific information on the accident at Chernobyl.

But at the news conference, Shcherbina said, “We have nothing to keep secret about.”