Floodwaters engulf Ukraine front line
Residents flee from both sides of dividing river
KHERSON, Ukraine — Thousands of people escaped inundated homes in southern Ukraine on Wednesday, including many rescued from rooftops, a day after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam gave rise to another humanitarian disaster along the front lines of the 15-month war.
Floodwaters engulfed streets and houses and sent residents fleeing with what belongings they could carry from dozens of communities on both sides of the Dnieper River, which divides the warring armies in much of southern Ukraine.
As the debris-choked waters began to peak Wednesday, reports indicated that some 4,000 people had been evacuated in Russian- and Ukrainian-controlled areas, according to officials on both sides, a fraction of the roughly 41,000 residents who Ukraine estimates were at risk from the flooding.
It was still unclear what caused the dam’s failure. Experts said a deliberate explosion inside the dam, which has been under Russian control since early in the war, most likely caused the massive structure of steelreinforced concrete to crumble.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said Russian forces, who have used the destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure as a tactic of war, had blown up the dam to “use the flood as a weapon.” Russian officials blamed Ukrainian shelling for damaging the facility, but experts said that was very unlikely to cause it to collapse.
In calls with Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, called for a “comprehensive investigation” by a commission of United Nations representatives, as well as Russian and Ukrainian experts.
There were still no confirmed reports of deaths, and the scale of the disaster, which drained a giant reservoir used for drinking water and irrigation, was only beginning to come into focus.
At least seven people were reported missing in the flooding, the Russian state news agency Tass reported, citing Vladimir Leontiev, the Russianinstalled mayor of Nova Kakhovka. On the Ukrainian side, three people were unaccounted for, the National Police said.
Zelensky said that hundreds of thousands of people were “without normal access to drinking water” and that emergency services were working to rush potable water to Ukrainian-controlled areas.
In the Ukrainian-held city of Kherson on the west bank, rescuers completely evacuated a neighborhood submerged in fetid floodwaters, venturing out in boats to pull people from roofs and the upper floors of homes. The river peaked at about 10 feet above normal.
Information about areas in the Russian-occupied east bank was difficult to obtain, but state television broadcast images of inundated villages, and Russian-appointed officials said about 1,500 people there had been evacuated.
The environmental toll of the disaster was also becoming clear. Ukraine’s agriculture ministry warned that the dam’s destruction cut off water to hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland, turning some of the country’s most productive grain fields “into deserts as early as next year.” The dam held back a body of water the size of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
Ukrainian officials also said roughly 150 tons of machine oil were released from an engine room in the dam, sending toxic waters downstream.