Polluted ground at the site of a massive Ukrainian hazardous chemical spill caught fire on Friday, despite government promises the site had been cleaned up, DPA reported . Phosphorus in dirt at the location of a mid-July derailment of fifteen tanker cars in west Ukraine was igniting throughout the morning, spewing poisonous smoke into the atmosphere, said Rostislav Slipets, a local politician, the Interfax news agency reported. The July 16 accident releasing an estimated 150 tons of the toxic chemical phosphorus into the environment hospitalised 147, and forced the evacuation of more than 2,000 villagers in Ukraine's Lviv province. Phosphorus, an element used in the manufacture of fertilizers and explosives, ignites violently when exposed to oxygen. Ukraine's government declared the spill site cleaned up on July 27. The ground where the phosphorus had been dumped was smoking constantly, and had been catching fire spontaneously since Friday morning, Slipets said. The development was a black eye for a host of Ukrainian officials who, facing parliamentary elections at the end of September, in recent weeks have touted the supposedly efficient clean-up of the July accident as proof to voters the government was doing its job well. "They said they hauled away hundreds of tons of polluted dirt, but in fact it was only a couple of barrels," Slipets claimed. "It really was a very superficial clean-up." Ukraine has been hit with a rash of industrial and railroad accidents in recent weeks, contradicting government claims of proper management of the country's transportation and accident control ministries. A blaze struck Friday elsewhere in the Lviv province, after a locomotive at an oil refinery rammed into a train of twelve tanker cars loaded with petrol, setting three on fire. Firemen extinguished the fire in half an hour. The container cars were ruined, but there were no injuries or major damage to surrounding buildings, said Pavlo Vasilenko, an Emegency Situations spokesman, according to a Korrespondent news agency report. The last deadly industrial accident took place on Tuesday, when poison gas leaking from a sewage treatment plant in the east Ukraine province Kherson killed three workers and hospitalized fourteen.
