Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry says its teams have managed to reduce the size of wildfires around Moscow and other regions in western Russia.
The ministry said yesterday that the area engulfed by fires around the capital has shrunk by more than a quarter over the past 24 hours.
It said emergency teams have also managed to significantly reduce the size of fires in other parts of Russia.
PHOTO: EPA
The ministry said all wildfires in areas contaminated by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster have been quickly extinguished and radiation levels have remained normal.
A special firefighting train and 70 more people were sent to join more than 3,400 firefighters battling to douse wildfires close to the top nuclear research center in Sarov, a town in the Nizhny Novgorod region still closed to foreigners as in Soviet times, an emergencies ministry spokesman said.
While no blazes had been registered on the territory of the nuclear research center in Sarov itself, a nearby nature reserve has been on fire for about a week.
The nature reserve is located in the nearby region of Mordovia and tree leaves and pine needles on the surface now are burning and smouldering, said Mikhail Turkov, a spokesman for the emergencies ministry’s Volga regional branch.
“Two planes and two helicopters are currently circling over Sarov,” Turkov said. “Reconnaissance is being constantly conducted from the air.”
A firefighting train has been involved in putting out the fires, while a second train was on its way to the scene. The firefighting trains contain vast amounts of water and special hoses.
Two soldiers were killed by blazing trees as they strove to put out a fire close to the center on Monday.
Moscow has choked for days on acrid smog from wildfires and peat bog fires.
With fires also burning to a lesser extent in Ukraine, officials said a fire 60km from Chernobyl started on Monday and would be extinguished yesterday or today.
“The fire presents no danger. There is no threat,” said Viktoria Ruban, spokeswoman for the Ukrainian emergency situations ministry.
Concern remained over the radiation risk from burning forests still contaminated by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster after officials admitted on Wednesday forest fires had hit hundreds of hectares of contaminated land.
“I would like to note that the radiation levels have not been exceeded,” the emergencies ministry quoted the head of its crisis center, Vladimir Stepanov, as saying.
Russian authorities have played down fears that the fires could create a cloud of radioactive particles by raising contaminated matter out from the soil.
“The particles could be transferred hundreds of kilometers depending on the weather conditions,” Alexei Yablokov, a founder of Greenpeace in the Soviet Union, told Interfax.
“If the Bryansk region is on fire, they [the particles] could turn up in the Novgorod region [to the north], in Moscow and in certain circumstances in Eastern Europe,” he said.
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