Race to save thousands threatened by dam burst

Torrents flood Ukraine war zone A race against time was underway on Wednesday to save up to 60,000 people in southern Ukraine threatened by a torrent of water gushing through the destroyed Kakhovka hydroelectric dam.

Residents abandoned inundated homes and 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.

Over 30,000 cubic meters of water is pouring out of the dam’s reservoir every second and the flood has reached five meters high. Ukraine said the flood would leave hundreds of thousands of people without access to drinking water, swamp tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land and turn at least 500,000 hectares deprived of irrigation into deserts.

“If the water rises by another meter, we will lose our house,” said Oleksandr Reva, who was moving family belongings from his riverbank village into the abandoned home of a neighbor on higher ground.

He watched as a roof of a house was swept down the swollen Dnipro River.

Kyiv said several months ago the dam had been mined by Russian forces who have controlled it since early in the 15-month-old invasion, and suggested Moscow blew it up to try to prevent Ukrainian forces crossing the

Dnipro in a counteroffensive. Residents in the flood zone in Ukraine’s south, a fertile, marshy region stretching to the Dnipro estuary on the Black Sea, blamed the bursting of the dam on Russian troops who controlled it 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.”

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.

In the town of Nova Kakhovka

right next to the dam, brown water submerged main streets largely empty of residents.

Valery Melnik, 53, said he had hoped for help from local authorities to pump out the water from his swamped home, but so far “they are not doing anything.”

Two thousand people have been evacuated from the Ukrainiancontrolled part of the flood zone and waters reached their highest level in 17 settlements with a combined population of 16,000 people.

The huge reservoir behind the dam irrigated large areas of one of the world’s biggest grain-exporting nations, including Crimea, illegally seized by Russia in 2014.