Helping firefighters and victims of the 2020 fires in the Zone.

In early April 2020 the forest caught fire in the Chornobyl Zone. Within ten days the fire reached Prypiat. In an interview with UNIAN, Kateryna Aslamova called it the largest fire in the entire history of the Zone.

We had not planned to raise money. But people started writing to us themselves: where to send money, what to buy. So we opened a fundraiser, and the volunteers were coordinated by Dmytro Shybalov. In those weeks the volunteer car covered about one and a half thousand kilometers in the Zone.

The first load was water, snacks, soap, towels and disinfectants. And something firefighters needed just as much - detailed maps showing forest types. Firefighters from Kryvyi Rih and other cities came to reinforce the Zone. "We're like blind people here," they said: nobody knew the terrain, and the official maps were too general. With our maps, the work became much easier.

Spare parts were a quest of their own. The firefighters gave us a whole list. Their trucks, with bitter irony, turned out to be the same old ZILs seen putting out the ChNPP fire in every photo and video from 1986. Parts for them have long been out of production. We found them in the Kharkiv region, and the trucks kept going. We also bought backpack sprayers for the firefighters and helped scout the area with a drone.

At the same time our information headquarters was working. Online meetings with ecologists, up to seventeen interviews a day for Ukrainian and foreign media, in different languages - among others, for Germany's Der Spiegel. Yaroslav gave some of the interviews right behind the wheel, on the way to the Zone. We understood that every minute of inaction meant more fire and more history destroyed. So we hurried, asked, shouted, informed. When the fire passed Yaniv station and stood two kilometers from the Pidlisnyi radioactive waste storage site, Yaroslav publicly stated that the scale of the fire was being downplayed.

We also helped civilians - people whose homes burned in Lychmany and neighboring villages.

At the end of April the police canceled the pass for the volunteer vehicle. Soon afterwards a meeting was held with the Exclusion Zone Agency and the ministry about creating a permanent volunteer center.