KIEV, April 14. /TASS/. The so-called crown fires spreading across the tops of trees have been spotted near the defunct Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Ukraine’s State Agency on Exclusion Zone Management said on its Facebook account.
"Crown fires are observed in the exclusion zone," the service said. The blaze was raging in the Rossokha village and near the Krivaya Gora village on the left bank of the Pripyat River.
Earlier, a fire was extinguished between the Pripyat River and a cooling pond and also near an open distribution unit.
The fire in the exclusion zone broke out on April 4. Twelve former villages, where the residents were evacuated after the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl NPP, have been burnt out. The firefighting effort involves more than 390 people and 90 pieces of equipment, including aircraft. Ukrainian Deputy Interior Minister Anton Geraschenko stated that the fire did not pose any threat to nuclear waste depositories and the Chernobyl NPP.
The Ukrainian government will allocate 44.86 mln hryvnias (nearly $1.7 mln) from the reserve fund to battle the fire. According to the investigators, the fire occurred because a man had burnt garbage and left the fire unattended.
The Emergencies Ministry in Russia’s Bryansk Region is monitoring the environmental situation in the region following the fire in the nearby Chernobyl exclusion zone. According to the latest data, the radiation background has been unchanged and is within the normal level. The nearest fire is 190 km from the Bryansk Region.
The disaster at the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant occurred in the small hours of April 26, 1986, contaminating more than 200,000 square kilometers of territory, first and foremost, in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
Around 115,000 people were evacuated from the 30-kilometer affected zone. The subsequent clean-up operation involved more than 600,000 people, about ten percent of whom died, and 165,000 ended up with disabilities.