TEN YEARS AGO: NUCLEAR DISASTER IN UKRAINE: Up to 15,000 feared dead (04/21/96)

TEN YEARS AGO

NUCLEAR DISASTER IN UKRAINE: Up to 15,000 feared dead

Reprinted below is The Weekly's first news story about the nuclear accident at the Chornobyl power plant in Ukraine. It appeared in the May 4, 1986, issue.

JERSEY CITY, N.J. - Up to 15,000 are feared dead in what many Western experts are calling the worst nuclear accident in history. The accident occurred at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, located near the town of Prypiat, some 60 miles north of Kyiv, capital of Ukraine. Reports of the accident were first released on April 28.

This figure of 15,000 is based on unconfirmed reports from Ukraine. The reports also state that the dead were buried at a nuclear waste disposal site.

(A member of the intelligence community who is familiar with this type of nuclear installation said the figure of 15,000 deaths is conceivable.)

This and other information was transmitted to Svoboda and The Ukrainian Weekly by Ukrainian Americans in the Northeast and Midwest who have relatives in Ukraine whom they managed to contact via telephone. The relatives spoke on condition that their names not be used.

Reports from residents of Kyiv indicate that there are some 10,000 to 15,000 casualties. Thousands of bandaged and bloody persons have been brought to the city's hospitals, and the hospitals are packed with the wounded.

Earlier reports carried by United Press International said that a resident of Kyiv revealed deaths had surpassed the 2,000 mark, and that 10,000 to 15,000 persons were evacuated from Prypiat. This woman, too, had said the dead were buried at a radioactive waste site, reportedly in either the village of Pyrohivtsi or Pyrohove, southwest of the accident site.

Residents of three other settlements near the power plant also were evacuated.

Meanwhile, from Lviv, western Ukraine, another relative learned the people have not been told the extent of the nuclear accident, although they do know that one has occurred. Soviet authorities have not told the residents of Lviv about any safety precautions they should be taking, such as not eating fresh produce, not drinking the water, staying indoors, or taking iodine tables.

This is in marked contrast to the situation in Poland, where children and pregnant women were given iodine in liquid or tablet form, and told not to drink milk from grass-fed cows or eat fresh produce.

The BBC reported that an area approximately 18 miles around the Chornobyl plant has been proclaimed a security zone. Western news media were barred from Kyiv and the area near the nuclear plant.

As of May 1, the West was reporting that the newest of four 1,000-megawatt reactors at Chornobyl had experienced a meltdown and a second reactor was threatened, and that a graphite fire was continuing to spew radioactivity into the air.

Official Soviet sources, however, were saying that the fire was under control and that radiation levels were decreasing. Soviet authorities also said that only two persons had died as a result of the accident and that 197 were injured, 18 of them critically.

The USSR declined to accept aid from the United States or the International Red Cross.

The original Soviet announcement that a nuclear accident had occurred at Chornobyl came in a terse, four-sentence announcement disseminated on April 28 by TASS. The announcement came only after authorities in Sweden had detected abnormally high levels of radioactivity in their country.

European governments condemned Soviet authorities for not immediately announcing the accident and for not being forthright with information about the extent of the disaster.

Ukrainians in the United States and Canada who tried to phone relatives in Ukraine were in many cases told that the phone lines were down.

The Kobasniuk Travel Agency canceled two tours to Ukraine that were supposed to have been in Kyiv on May 14, Easter Sunday according to the Julian calendar. Other tours were put on hold for an indefinite period, as the U.S. government cautioned Americans not to travel to the Ukrainian capital.

As of May 1, when it became apparent that the winds were shifting and the radioactive cloud from the Chornobyl nuclear power plant was headed toward southern and western Ukraine, experts feared that the crop-growing area of Ukraine would be destroyed for years to come.

Meanwhile, many Ukrainian Americans expressed concern that the full effects of the nuclear catastrophe at Chornobyl would become known only years later; that it would take years to ascertain the long-term effects on the land, water and people. Moreover, there was fear that large areas around the nuclear site would be uninhabitable for decades.

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