There are reports of panic buying of iodine drops in Severodvinsk. Emergency officials reported a spike in background radiation. The White Sea bay where both the shipbuilding port and the regional capital, Arkhangelsk, are located has been ordered closed for swimming and fishing because of the presence of toxic rocket fuel.
A month after a fire aboard a secretive military submarine killed 14 people and prompted criticism of the Russian Defense Ministry, a new fatal incident involving military forces in Russia's far north has raised new criticism of how authorities handle deadly, and potentially embarrassing, information.
The explosion, reported Thursday, occurred in Nyonoksa, a Dvina Bay port not far from the shipbuilding town of Severodvinsk, at a naval site that has been used for decades to test missiles, including intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
In its initial statement on the incident, the Defense Ministry said two people were killed and six injured in the blast and the fire that resulted. The ministry said that liquid rocket fuel was the cause of the blast, but that "no harmful chemicals were released into the atmosphere."
(That death toll was Saturday, according to a statement issued by Rosatom. That the update was released by the state-run atomic power agency, not the Defense Ministry, added to mounting evidence of some sort of nuclear-related accident at the site.)
In the hours that followed, however, city emergency officials in Severodvinsk reported a spike in radiation levels.
The levels were 20 times higher than normal, which prompted the environmental group to call on federal authorities to identify what kind of radiation had been released and whether it was any danger to nearby residents.
Emergency officials, meanwhile, said that radiation levels posed no risk to people nearby, and did not exceed annual norms for humans.
That hasn’t assuaged the concerns of residents of Severodvinsk. said that nearly all the pharmacies in the city have been emptied of iodine drops, which are used to protect the thyroid gland from certain types of radiation.
Contacted by telephone by RFE/RL, one pharmacy in Severodvinsk reported being sold out of iodine as of Thursday. A second said most of its supplies had been bought up. The employees contacted would not give their names.
Citing unnamed officials at the Arkhangelsk airport, 29.ru also reported that three of those injured in the explosion had been sent in an emergency flight to Moscow for treatment, and those accompanying them were wearing hazardous-material protective suits.
On Friday, meanwhile, the newspaper that military officials had ordered a monthlong ban on swimming and fishing in the entire Dvina Bay, which flows into the White Sea, after detecting the presence of a highly toxic rocket fuel known as heptyl. The fuel has been used in Russian rockets for years; Kazakh environmentalists have long complained about heptyl-fueled rockets being launched from the Baikonur facility poisoning the Kazakh steppe.
reported Friday that its sensors had not reported any increase in radiation levels since the previous day, and it had received no official notification from Russia about any potential incident.
Severodvinsk, which has nearly 180,000 inhabitants, itself is the site of two major naval shipyards that build and repair nuclear-powered submarines and other ships. Environmental groups have for years warned of increased radiation levels in nearby waters.
If the incident was caused by a rocket explosion or crash, the most important question, said Andrei Zolotkov, a Murmansk-based researcher with the environmental monitoring group Bellona, is where it occurred: on land or in the water. That will determine how much contamination is released and where, he said.
"It's a bad thing either way," Zolotkov told RFE/RL.
Russian news agencies said that three of the injured were in critical condition. What was potentially more concerning, Zolotkov said, were the reports about emergency workers wearing radiation suits as they accompanied some of the injured being transported to Moscow hospitals.
That would be an indication of radioactive contamination, something that the Nyonoksa test site isn't known for, he said — from possibly a low-level nuclear device or even a nuclear-powered rocket engine.
“This worries me more than anything else,” he said.
The explosion is the second mishap to occur at the Nyonoksa test site in recent years. In 2015, a test of a cruise missile went awry, sending the weapons flying into an apartment building. No casualties were reported, nor was there any reported radiation or other contamination.