Radiation levels surged 17 times higher than normal this week near the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine, as forest fires tore through the disaster area, officials said.
Ukraine’s emergency services said a fire covering 50 acres was under control Sunday, but two other blazes were still raging the next day at the exclusion zone, which was established after the 1986 blast at the plant, according to CNN.
Egor Firsov, the head of the state ecological inspection service, said a Geiger counter used at the site revealed the worrisome data Sunday at the disaster area.
“There is bad news — in the center of the fire, radiation is above normal,” Firsov wrote on Facebook along with 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.”
He said the radiation levels in the capital of Kiev, about 60 miles south of the site, were within the normal range.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone, which remains largely unpopulated, has been mostly overtaken by nature, making it prone to forest fires.
“The problem of setting fires to grass by careless citizens in spring and autumn has long been a very acute problem for us,” Firsov wrote. “Every year we see the same picture — fields, reeds, forests burn in all regions.”