Evacuees Face Fire on Visit to Chernobyl

What began as a solemn annual pilgrimage to the ghost towns around Chernobyl ended in horror Tuesday as returning villagers watched raging brush fires destroy much of what remained of their communities 10 years after the world’s worst nuclear accident.

On an unusually warm afternoon, a fire that started in tall, dry grass about six miles northwest of the stricken power plant spread quickly over 100 acres to five deserted villages before being extinguished seven hours later, firefighters said.

No injuries were reported, but officials said the wind-whipped flames sent radioactive particles high into the air, forming a new radioactive cloud that was drifting toward the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, and its 2.6 million residents.

Monitors flown in helicopters into the cloud recorded only a slight radiation increase, said Nikolai Komshensky, a spokesman for Ukraine’s nuclear regulatory agency. “We see no reason to be concerned now.”

But Volodymyr Martiniuk, a spokesman for the country’s Ministry of Environment, said “radiation in the zone is very patchy” and that the levels of danger from cesium, strontium and plutonium particles in the air were still being measured.

The flames caused hysteria in the village of Tovsty Lis, where pilgrims returning to visit their homes had earlier held traditional Orthodox meals at gravesides. Reuters news agency said they wept in each other’s arms as the fire consumed wooden homes, a school and an 18th century church where they had left piles of Easter eggs in accordance with Orthodox tradition.

Burning tiled roofs cracked like gunfire as firefighters tried to clear a path through the flames back to the six buses that had brought the villagers on their yearly visit.

“We lived through the Nazis and lots of other dreadful things,” Polina Matushchenko, 58, told Reuters in Tovsty Lis. “But I have never seen such a horror.”

Firefighters said the blaze was apparently started by a cigarette dropped by one of the family members visiting graves near the village.

The fire spread quickly through four other villages in the 18-mile exclusion zone around the Chernobyl plant, where a reactor fire 10 years ago Friday killed 30 people outright and exposed 5 million more to radioactive fallout, mostly in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

Small forest fires are not unusual in the exclusion zone around the plant. But Vasily Melnik, Kiev’s fire service chief, called Tuesday’s blaze the worst since the 1986 accident.

Officials say 95% of the radioactive molecules in the exclusion zone have sunk into the soil. But some have been taken up by plants and trees and, despite decontamination efforts, remain on the vacant cottages and buildings abandoned by the thousands of people evacuated from the zone.

As a result, fires in the region pose one of the greatest environmental dangers left by the disaster.

“This is clearly a danger to the health of people, and not only in Ukraine,” said Antony Frogatt, a spokesman in Kiev for the Greenpeace environmental group.

Officials at Chernobyl said the fire posed no peril to the plant itself, where the crippled reactor and one other are shut down but two reactors are still generating electricity.

Leaders of Russia and the Group of 7 industrial democracies, meeting in Moscow last weekend as the Chernobyl anniversary approached, confirmed their commitment to foot the $3-billion bill to help Ukraine close the Soviet-designed plant by 2000.

On Monday, however, Ukrainian Environment Minister Yuri Kostenko emphasized that closing the reactors may reassure the West but will not address Ukraine’s problem of cleaning up Chernobyl’s aftermath so that fires like Tuesday’s don’t threaten public safety hundreds of miles away.