Soviets Fought Fire at Chernobyl a Month After Reactor Accident

A fire broke out in the Chernobyl nuclear plant in late May and nearly caused an explosion, about a month after the reactor disaster there and just two weeks after the reactor blaze was declared extinguished, a Soviet newspaper disclosed Wednesday.

Leninskoye Znamya, a publication of Moscow’s Communist Party, quoted firemen who struggled to put out the blaze as saying they barely managed to keep the flames from reaching a room in the plant where oil tanks were stored.

It said fire brigades from northern suburbs of Moscow were mobilized on May 8 to go to Chernobyl, where an explosion and fire had sparked the world’s worst nuclear disaster. The April 26 accident left at least 31 dead.

The teams were still on the road on May 9, the day experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency said the fire at the Chernobyl reactor was out.

Upon their arrival, the firemen worked night and day pumping water from reservoirs under the reactor. But on May 23, they were alerted that smoke had again been sighted at the plant.

“They called me at 2 in the morning and gave us the task of finding the source of the fire,” Deputy Fire Capt. Nikolai Bocharnikov told the newspaper.

A team of 28 men set out with respiration equipment, flares and radiation monitoring devices. Making a tour of the station, they found smoke reaching a height of 40 feet and then saw flames approaching the room with oil tanks in it.

“It’s impossible to say what might have happened if the (flames) had reached them,” Bocharnikov said. “Four fire engines arrived just in time.”

The paper, which reported the fire for the first time, did not specify whether the fire had broken out in proximity to any of the plant’s four nuclear reactors. The cause of the May fire was also not reported. The April explosion occurred in the fourth reactor during unauthorized experiments.

The delay in reporting the second fire was not explained. The Soviet media often has been slow in recounting details of what happened at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The April 26 accident was not announced to the world until nearly three days later--well after elevated radiation levels were detected in Scandinavia.

Bocharnikov said the firemen took turns fighting the blaze, each man spending only a few seconds in the affected area before taking shelter behind concrete walls.

The paper quoted the fire captain as saying the firefighters’ radiation detectors “went off the scale.”

Fire squads called in from Kiev, 60 miles south of Chernobyl, and Kharkov, 300 miles to the southeast, began arriving at 3:30 a.m.

The paper said the fire was put out during the same day, without giving details. It said the initial team underwent medical checks several hours after going off duty.

Radiation Exposure Cited

It implied the men had been exposed to radiation, saying they left their clothes behind when they left Chernobyl. The bus they took back to Kiev was also washed down when abnormal radiation levels were found on a rear wheel.

“After the task they had to fulfill at the nuclear power station, this appeared but a trifle,” the newspaper commented.

The paper said the firemen from the Moscow region had been honored upon their return home.