As the world battles the coronavirus, hundreds of firefighters are battling massive fires that are inching closer to the site of the worst nuclear disaster in human history.
Ukraine has mobilized more than 400 firefighters to help extinguish the wildfires, which environmental group Greenpeace Russia said were less than a mile away from the protective dome that was placed over one of the reactors to prevent the spread of radiation.
The fires broke out near the “exclusion zone” and have grown at an alarming rate, according to AFP. Greenpeace said the fires are the worst since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, and Sergiy Zibtsev, head of the Regional Eastern European Fire Monitoring Center, called the fires “unpredictable” and “super-huge.”
Zibtsev said that the fires have already consumed about 50,000 acres in the western part of the exclusion zone.
Ukrainian officials have said there is no need to panic about the fires and that the situation was safe. Authorities said the blaze began on April 4 when a man burned some dry grass and started a fire that became unwieldy and spread because of the wind.
Yegor Firsov, head of Ukraine’s state ecological inspection service, claimed in a Facebook post that radiation levels in the area were abnormal because of the fire but later recanted the statement.
In addition to the fires near the abandoned nuclear plant, Ukraine is also dealing with the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed the lives of at least 93 people in the country and infected more than 3,100.
