Update: Sixty-four of the around 300 people who have, effectively, worked 600-hour shifts at the closed Chernobyl nuclear power plant were allowed to leave Sunday, the Washington Post reports. The 210 or so workers who were on shift when Russian forces took control of the plant three and a half weeks ago have been forced to stay rather than rotating shifts as they usually do; the plant says that on Sunday, 46 Ukrainian "employee-volunteers" took over for the 50 shift workers who were allowed to leave. (The other 14 released were National Guard servicemembers and others; see this post for more.) It's not clear when anyone else might be allowed out. Our original story from March 15 follows:
Russian forces took control of Chernobyl on Feb. 24. Roughly 210 technicians and support staff who are tasked with minding the circulation of cool water over Chernobyl's spent fuel rods have been at the plant since they arrived for what was to be a 12-hour shift, unable to leave and "approaching 500 hours on the job," as Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw put it in a piece for the Wall Street Journal. They point out that over the past few weeks, there have been "competing Ukrainian and Russian narratives" about how those staffers and the facility in general are doing. They've done their best to piece together a more complete narrative, one based on interviews with workers on the inside, relatives, and local officials, as well as recordings of a call placed each morning by the plant to managers in an office some 30 miles away.
What Parkinson and Hinshaw pieced together is highly uncomfortable: workers in need of medication; a 70-year-old cook who has collapsed from exhaustion; no food beyond porridge and canned items; and seized phones, with only minute-long calls permitted to family. A standout paragraph:
- "The emergency playing out at Chernobyl is a hostage crisis. Nuclear experts can’t think of a precedent in their highly regulated industry for a small crew being forced to work for weeks at gunpoint. Three weeks in, the crew has worked almost twice as long as the firefighters who put out a 10-day blaze after the Chernobyl disaster."
(Read
the full story.)
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