Chernobyl Evacuees Still Awaiting New Housing, Letter Says

A Soviet family evacuated after the Chernobyl nuclear accident last April is still waiting to receive new housing, according to a letter published by the government daily Izvestia on Thursday.

The Tereshchenko family wrote that it has been given permission by the government of the Ukraine and the republic’s Energy Ministry to be resettled in Stavropol, a city in the Russian Federation.

But the town council of Stavropol, about 600 miles southeast of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, had refused to give the family a home because it only had a permit to live in Pripyat, a town close to Chernobyl.

Izvestia said it had telephoned the head of the department responsible for distributing housing in Stavropol and was told the situation will be “resolved positively.”

It did not say where the family had been staying since it was evacuated but noted that the letter was sent from Stavropol.

Soviet authorities have said all the estimated 135,000 people evacuated from the area around Chernobyl, about 80 miles north of Kiev, have been resettled since the disaster, which has caused at least 30 deaths.