MOSCOW, July 19. /TASS/. The people that have been evacuated due to a fire at a Crimean military range have been provided with everything they need, Vladimir Konstantinov, the chairman of the Crimean State Council, said on Rossiya-24 television.
"Places for evacuation have been set up. There are volunteers, and there’s enough help. Everyone is provided with everything they need," he said. "From our experience, it’s for a day or two. It is not a long evacuation."
"The evacuation sites in the villages are under police protection. There’s enough accommodation to hold evacuees," he went on to say. "Everything was organized quickly."
According to a TASS reporter at the scene, a temporary accommodation center has been set up at a school in the village of Pervomayskoye. It is accommodating about 500 people in classrooms. People are provided with water and hot meals. They say the evacuation was well organized and took about an hour and a half. Some of the people in the villages that are nearest to the site of the emergency were transported by buses, but some others preferred to stay at home. The administration of School No. 2 in the village of Kirovskoye earlier told TASS that the institution, which had been turned into a temporary accommodation center, had received the first group of evacuated people.
The head of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, said on Wednesday morning that a fire had erupted at a military range in the Kirovsky District. He said on Telegram that more than 2,200 people from the villages of Aivazovskoye, Abrikosovka, Krinichky and Privetnoye, which are the closest to the fire, were expected to be evacuated. The evacuated residents are set to be taken to two temporary accommodation centers that were set up at schools in the settlements of Pervomaiskoye and Kirovskoye. Ambulance teams are on duty in each settlement of the Kirovsky District. The fire prompted officials to shut down a section of the Tavrida highway. No casualties have been reported in connection with the incident. A task force has been created to extinguish the fire.