Ships sail for Chernobyl

Press, 29 August 1986, Page 6

Ships sail for Chernobyl

NZPA-Reuter Moscow Eleven ships, which will serve as floating hostels for workers engaged in the Chernobyl clean-up, are sailing to the area of ithe damaged nuclear power station, the Soviet Communist Party newspaper “Pravda” reports. The vessels had sailed through the Volga-Don canal to the port of Azov, and were to cross the Sea of Azov and Black Sea before heading up the Dnieper River towards Chernobyl, it said. The convoy also included a ship carrying drinking water, a water treatment vessel, and a floating shop. The Chernobyl plant lies near the Pripyat River, which, like the Dnieper, flows into the Kiev reservoir. Workers from across the Soviet Union have been struggling to decontaminate a zone of high radiation round the plant, which is 130 km north of Kiev in the Ukraine. Soviet military reservists forced to help with the clean-up staged a strike and scuffled with •authorities, said an Estonian language daily in West Germany yesterday. The report was based on articles recently carried in a Soviet newspaper. The stories said a group of Estonian conscripts went on strike and fought with police in June when they were told their tour of duty was being extended from two to six months. The reservists were conscripted abruptly, often in the middle of the night