Explosions of non-professionalism

Yesterday rescuers continued to put out fire at the BRSM-Nafta oil base near the town of Vasylkiv. By Wednesday morning, four fuel tanks had burned out, and another six were still burning (there used to be 12 earlier), Mykola Chechotkin, Chairman of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine (DSNS) said. The death toll remains the same, but rescuers cannot find one firefighter. Another ten, who were injured in the blaze, had 10 to 96 percent of their body burnt. For this reason, Kyivites were offering to donate blood to help them.

According to the DSNS chair, rescuers are planning to continue dousing the blazing tanks with foam to reduce the intensity of burning and smoke formation. There are 300 people and 45 pieces of equipment working on the site. “There is no danger of the fire spreading towards the military unit, the KLO oil base, and this military unit’s airfield,” Chechotkin said reassuringly yesterday.

The population is also being told that there were no excessive emissions of hazardous matter in the air. Specialists sample air pollution three or four times a day on the ground and in other places, and there are no serious excesses, says Volodymyr Shandra, Chairman of the Kyiv Oblast Administration.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov has said that the management of BRSM, whose oil base near Vasylkiv caught fire on Monday, is under suspicion of laundering the money received for marketing the stolen or illegally customs-cleared gasoline. “We have opened two criminal cases in the last while against the company BRSM. One of them was opened in connection with adulteration of the fuel quality. This case was dealt with by the Prosecutor General’s Office, and the second case was opened just a week and a half ago,” the minister said. He explained the details of the second case. “It is about a more serious Article 191   – ‘embezzlement.’ An Interior Ministry investigator suspects a 1.2-billion-hryvnia fraud. It is about taking the fuel through some dubious-reputation companies and equally dubious sources. In plain language, the prosecution suspects that this company laundered stolen or illegally customs-cleared gasoline,” he said. According to Avakov, the investigation is going on and it is too early to draw concrete conclusions. “Maybe, these instances are interconnected, but I would allow investigators to look into it more thoroughly,” he emphasized.