“We need more money to take care of the zone properly, but we have made a plan for the next ten years within our means, which will improve the safety of the zone.” “For the last four years, we have not had the best situation with bad conditions inside the zone,” says Vasyliovych, who was appointed as head of the agency after the fires. Euronews has not yet been able to verify that this particular truck dates from that long ago but a source from the fire department told our reporter that it looks like a truck dating "from around 1985 to 1987." Thirty-four years after the accident the fire trucks are just the same," he said. "These same vehicles were photographed this spring. Yemelianenko meanwhile, says he has seen the fire trucks from the fires caused by the 1986 disaster fighting the 2020 fires. He has been in contact with several firefighters who worked in Chernobyl during the fires and reports that they have outdated equipment and mostly use almost 30-year-old ZIL-131-trucks, which often break down, creating more operational instability. Maxim Pisarsky is the chairman of the trade union of fire rescue workers in the eastern city of Zaporizhia, and he is a member of a movement trying to create better working conditions for firefighters across Ukraine. It seems that anyone can reach all around the exclusion zone." Firefighters unprepared They are not radioactive enough to be under such protection, but they are still radioactive. But the zone also has other radiative objects. “The highly radiative objects from the Chernobyl explosion are all guarded by barbed wire with guards, and so I am not worried about those. He questions the security of the site, asserting that it is easy for anyone to sneak past the manned checkpoints around the perimeter. He says he saw evidence of "ill-equipped firefighters, lousy management, lack of coordination, and disinformation from the government." He believes more must be done to secure the area, starting with a better fence and more patrolling. Every time someone had to be sent somewhere, the information had to go to the officers, who then would decide to send firefighters and equipment, but when they finally decided to do so, the fire would be five times bigger, and had spread to another place.”īecause of quarantine measures due to COVID-19, many journalists were not able to travel to the zone, but Yemelianenko got there and reported what he saw on Facebook. “A lot of fallen trees made it possible for the fire to spread quickly in the thick and wild forests. “It was complicated for firefighters to get to certain places inside the zone because state agencies had not taken care of the woods properly,” asserts Yaroslav Yemelianenko, head of the travel company Chernobyl Tour. France's Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) noted the readings 'did not reveal abnormal values.' But those with intimate knowledge of the site fear the fires, and the way they were dealt with, demonstrate just how vulnerable the zone is to potentially catastrophic consequences. The fires destroyed multiple tourist sites and threatened nuclear waste storage facilities inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone - the site of the colossal 1986 nuclear accident.
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