Just when you didn’t think it could get any worse, it does. (This is, after all, Russia.)
The World Wildlife Federation is concerned that, just as the Emergency Ministry fears, fires in the Bryansk region may send radioactivity into the air.
“There are radioactive substances in the upper layer of Bryansk forests and in forest areas in the regions of Lipetsk, Kaluga and Tula. They are remainders of the radioactive cloud that was coming from the accident zone at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986,” Nikolai Shmatkov, a forestry projects coordinator at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), told a news conference.
Fantastic.
via Interfax
And aren’t you also sitting atop a sleeping volcano?
Seriously, though, I feel terrible for everyone there. I was suffocating in Moscow for the fires in 2002, but this is so much worse.
I am visiting Kiev & Chernobyl in September, how far are the fires from the exclusion zone?
Hi Twan,
There was smoke reported in Kiev but officials say that is was from fires in RF. Still, Kiev has many dry peat bogs and scorching heat so we should not feel secure that the fires will not close in on this region. I don’t know why Europe is not getting involved in this.