A total of 1343 rescuers and 299 vehicles are still working on putting out the smoldering remaining at the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine (SESU) stated on its official website on Tuesday.
"As of 7 am on April 21, SESU continues to assist the State Agency on Exclusion Zone Management in putting down the fires at the territory of Korogodsky, Lubyansky, Paryshivsky, Dityatkovsky, and Denysovichsky forestry... 1343 people and 299 vehicles, including three helicopters, which carried out 189 water discharges, equal to about 378 tons of water on April 20," the message published by the Emergency Service reads.
Currently, the rescuers are using SESU heavy machinery and an additional eight Armed Forces trucks to create firebreaks in the exclusion zone.
Head of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine Mykola Chechetkin informed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on April 14 that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone fire has been extinguished, while the rescuers will need a few more days to put out smoldering.
Overall, the firefighters have been working for three weeks, trying to quench the blaze that started on April 4 some two hours north of the country's capital of Kiev, near the border with Belarus.
While investigators are still trying to determine the cause of the forest fire, police have detained two people suspected of triggering the blaze by setting dry grass on fire in the area.
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is located some 110 km north of Kiev and witnessed one of the worst nuclear disasters in human history on April 26, 1986. After a meltdown and explosion of the plant's reactor, a large tract of land around the facility was designated as a forbidden zone.
After radiation levels decreased, the 30-square-km area around the plant was officially opened to tourists in 2010.
