Residents flee, others are rescued in Ukraine as waters rise after dam break

Floodwaters in southern Ukraine were expected to crest on Wednesday, with tens of thousands of civilians fleeing in peril from the destruction of a vast dam that both sides called an act of wartime sabotage.

Residents waded through flooded streets carrying children on their shoulders, dogs in their arms and belongings in plastic bags while rescuers used rubber boats to search areas where the waters reached above head height. Ukraine and Russia each accuse the other of deliberately destroying the Nova Kakhovka dam in desperation at a major turning point in the war.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the dam’s destruction had left hundreds of thousands of people without normal access to drinking water.

Officials said that parts of the Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv and Kherson regions in the south and southeast of Ukraine would suffer from disrupted water supplies. The health ministry warned of potential health hazards because of chemicals in the water, and urged residents to drink only bottled and safe water, and to use safe water when cooking.

“Everything is submerged in water, all the furniture, the fridge, food, all flowers, everything is floating. I do not know what to do,” said Oksana, 53, in the city of Kherson downriver from the dam.

Ukraine says 42,000 people are at direct risk from flooding.

Angered residents

A roof of a house could be seen whisking in the torrent of the Dnipro River.

“If the water rises for another metre, we will lose our house,” said Oleksandr Reva, in a village on the bank, who was moving his family’s belongings into the abandoned home of a neighbour on higher ground.

Residents blamed the disaster on Russian troops who controlled the dam from their positions on the opposite bank.

“They hate us,” Reva said. “They want to destroy a Ukrainian nation and Ukraine itself. And they don’t care by what means because nothing is sacred for them.”

Dozens need rescue in Russia-controlled town

Russia imposed a state of emergency in the parts of Kherson province it controls, where many towns and villages lie in lowlands below the dam.

Up to 100 people in the Russian-controlled town of Nova Kakhovka are trapped and thousands of wild animals have been killed after the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine collapsed, the town’s Russian-installed mayor said, Russian news agencies reported.

Ukraine dam collapse forces thousands to flee

Mass evacuations are underway as Kyiv and Moscow blame each other for destroying the important Nova Kakhovka dam in Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine. The dam’s collapse has unleashed massive flooding and knocked out a key hydroelectric plant.

Over 30,000 cubic metres of water was pouring out of the reservoir, which the dam held back every second, and the town was at risk of contamination from the floods, the TASS news agency quoted the official, Vladimir Leontyev, as saying.

He said rescue efforts were being undertaken to free people trapped by the floods.

A graveyard, a burial site for cattle, and a special pit where dead animals were disinfected had all been covered with water, the RIA news agency cited an unnamed emergency services official as saying.

Leontyev, the mayor, was cited by RIA as saying that “thousands of animals” at the Nizhnedniprovsky National Nature Park had also been killed, and that the scale of the disaster was “huge.”

‘Far-reaching consequences’: UN official

The consequences of the disaster will be felt for decades in southern Ukraine. The huge reservoir behind the dam was one of Ukraine’s main geographic features, and its waters irrigated huge swathes of agricultural land in one of the world’s biggest grain exporting nations, including Crimea, seized by Russia in 2014.

The flood “will have grave and far-reaching consequences for thousands of people in southern Ukraine on both sides of the front line through the loss of homes, food, safe water and livelihoods,” UN aid chief Martin Griffiths told the Security Council. “The sheer magnitude of the catastrophe will only become fully realized in the coming days.”

Targeting dams in war is explicitly banned by the Geneva Conventions. Neither side has presented public evidence demonstrating who was to blame.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday Ukraine had sabotaged the dam to distract attention from a new counteroffensive he said was “faltering.”

The U.S. said it was still gathering evidence about who was to blame, but that Ukraine would have had no reason to inflict such devastation on itself.

Fighting continues on the ground

Even as the evacuation was underway, Russia shelled Ukrainian-held territory across the river. Cracks of incoming artillery sent people trying to flee running for cover in Kherson. Reuters reporters heard four incoming artillery blasts near a residential neighbourhood where civilians were evacuating on Tuesday evening. The governor said one person was killed.

Russia said a Ukrainian drone had struck a town on the opposite bank during evacuations there and accused the Ukrainian side of continuing shelling despite the flooding.

The vast Dnipro River that bisects Ukraine forms the front line across the south in a war that reached a turning point this week, with the apparent start of a long-awaited Ukrainian counterattack using Western tanks.

Ukraine has kept largely silent about the counterattack, apart from suggesting troops had advanced around the eastern city of Bakhmut, finally captured this month by Russia after nearly a year of Europe’s deadliest ground combat since the Second World War. Russia claims to have thwarted major Ukrainian assaults in heavy fighting along the front since Sunday.

The emptying reservoir supplies water that cools Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia upstream. The UN nuclear watchdog said the plant should have enough water to cool its reactors for “some months” from a separate pond.