Radiation levels near the site of the Chernobyl nuclear accident have spiked as firefighters battles to contain two forest blazes in the area.
The two fires erupted Saturday in the uninhabited exclusion zone around Chernobyl, which was sealed off after the 1986 explosion at the plant, Ukraine’s emergency services reported.
Firefighters said they have managed to localize one of the fires in an area of about five hectares, but the second one continued burning, covering about 20 hectares. They said they were using aircraft to extinguish the blaze.
“There is bad news — in the center of the fire, radiation is above normal,” Egor Firsov, head of Ukraine’s ecological inspection service, wrote in alongside a video of a Geiger counter. “As you can see in the video, the readings of the device are 2.3, when the norm is 0.14. But this is only within the area of the fire outbreak.”
His measurements refer to the microsievert per hour reading; the maximum allowable amount of natural background radiation is 0.5 microsievert per hour, the emergency services said, but Firsov’s reported amount was nearly five times that.
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