Director of Chornobyl Reserve Announced Timeframes for Restoration of Affected Ecosystem

The nature of the Chornobyl exclusion zone affected by spring fires will be restored in a few years.

This was stated by Director of the Chornobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve Oleksandr Galushchenko.

“If the flames went through the forest, it doesn’t mean that everything died there. In some cases it caught fire a little, in some cases the wood was almost dead and would never be regenerated”, Galushchenko said.

According to him, in a year trees will grow to human height in the area of fires, and in three years “everything will be fine”.

“Dust is a good fertilizer”, Oleksandr Galushchenko explained. Speaking about animals, he noted that all mammals managed to escape from the fire and survived, but there were losses of rodents, reptiles and small birds.

However, Galushchenko highlighted, “If ten percent of the population remains, then in a year or two it will resume without problems.”

It should be reminded that fires occurred in the exclusion zone from 4 to 29 April on the territory of the Korohodskyi, Lubianskyi, Paryshivskyi, Dytiatkivskyi and Denysovytskyi forestries. 11, 5 thousand hectares in the southwestern part of the Chornobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve were affected. This is 5% of its territory.

According to the Public Broadcasting Service.