Oleksiy Kolesnik waded ashore and stood on shore, shaking, for the first time in hours. He was rescued on Wednesday morning after spending dawn on a cupboard in his flooded living room.
“The water came really fast,” said Mr Kolesnik, who was so weak that two rescuers had to help him out of a rubber dinghy. “It was so quick.”
Fetid, coffee-colored floodwaters, with eddies swirling plastic bags and pieces of straw, inundated streets in Kherson, a regional capital in southern Ukraine, where rescuers had evacuated a neighborhood cut off from flooded roads. Exhausted residents poured out of the inflatable boats, carrying at most a handbag or backpack, and sometimes a cat or dog.
The scene overlooking a flooded square was just a small snapshot of the tremendous devastation it caused the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam on TuesdayIn the process, more than 50 miles of the Dnipro River swelled until it swallowed docks, farms, gas stations, cars, factories and homes.
In quiet times it would be a disaster, but it struck a war-ravaged and largely depopulated region where the river is the front line and providing basic services and communications was already a struggle.
With chemical pollution, landmines thrown out of the way, and assorted debris — here a refrigerator, there a red armchair — the Dnipro River grabbed its contaminated fingers into drinking water supplies, bogged down crops and displaced thousands of people downstream from their shattered homes. Upstream, the reservoir that many Ukrainian farmers use to irrigate their fields and that the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant uses to cool its radioactive fuel has been drastically lowered.
“We’ve gotten used to the shelling, but I’ve never seen a situation like this,” said Larisa Kharchenko, a retired nurse in Kherson, who thought she could sit out Tuesday’s flooding when the water was knee-deep in her garden not at her house yet. On Wednesday it poured through her door; in some areas it reached the roofs of houses.
“It just keeps coming,” she said.
“Somebody has to arrest Putin,” she added, referring to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, who ordered the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
On the Russian-controlled riverbank, residents of the town of Oleshky used an online chat group to plead for help, searched for missing loved ones and sought help as flooding mounted. Some wrote that they gathered in the tallest buildings in their neighborhoods. Local officials – both Ukrainians who fled last year and those deployed by the Russian occupation – said almost the entire city was flooded.
“The water is coming! Help! I beg you!” one person wrote. “Three people on the roof, one elderly.” Another wrote that there were three adults and a 15-year-old boy on a roof – and that the boy panicked.
Another post said three children were stranded in a home. “The second floor is already under water,” it said. “I ask for help from anyone who takes care of this!”
Kateryna Kovtun posted a search for her grandparents in Oleshky on the forum and learned late Tuesday that they had been rescued from a roof and taken to a nearby village. “I don’t know what’s next,” she said.
Oleshky is one of 35 affected towns on the Russian-controlled side of the river, said Vladimir Saldo, the Kremlin’s appointed regional administrator.
The city of Kherson, a center of Ukraine’s agribusiness, lies on the western, Ukrainian-controlled bank of the Dnipro. Last year it fell into the hands of the invading forces, most residents fled and it was occupied for months. The Russians withdrew in November but continued to bombard the already battered city and surrounding region from across the river.
Many cliff-top neighborhoods above the river were spared by the flood, but lower-lying areas offered a panorama of water and floating debris. Rescue workers made their way in boats to get stranded, frightened people off roofs or upper floors of houses, with the occasional artillery thunder being heard in the background.
The entire Ostriv neighborhood, one of the areas most exposed to Russian shelling, was evacuated.
Alla Snegor, 55, a biology teacher, got off a boat and looked back at the flooded city streets.
“Think of what’s in this tide,” she said. “Pesticides, chemicals, oil, dead animals and fish, and even cemeteries have been washed away.”
Land mines laid by the armies were washed free, some exploding and others falling with the current to new locations, the United Nations has warned.
Serhiy Litovsky, 60, an electrician, said he was most concerned about the long struggle ahead for southern Ukraine, one of the world’s richest agricultural regions and dependent on irrigation, mostly from the quickly depleted reservoir.
“Nobody will live here without water,” he said. “The legacy of that will last for dozens of years.”
The extent of the disruption is difficult to estimate, he said: “Without war, this would be a major catastrophe. But that came with the war.”
Some people displaced by the flood were taken by train to Mykolaiv, a Black Sea port less than 40 miles northwest of Kherson. Mykolaiv was already burdened by its role as a transportation hub or temporary home for many people fleeing the fighting. According to the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs, around 190,000 internally displaced persons from Ukraine were living in the Mykolaiv region before the dam broke.
“The flooding,” the office said, “is likely to exacerbate an already fragile humanitarian situation.” Thousands of children were among the refugees, it said.
Southern Ukraine faces many difficulties, including finding long-term housing for thousands of people. Cities and towns – including Kryvyi Rih, an iron ore mining and steel smelting center – were excluded from drinking water drawn from the reservoir.
Before the war, the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant was the most important source of electricity in the South; Now in Russian hands, it was damaged by shelling and is not supplying power to the grid. It has sufficient cooling water for the time being, but its future remains highly doubtful.
“This is a catastrophe for the entire south,” said Roman Kostenko, chairman of the defense and intelligence committee in the Ukrainian parliament. But Wednesday is about saving people, he said, adding: “Later we will deal with the legacy.”
Mr Kostenko, who is also a colonel in Ukraine’s army, on Wednesday coordinated efforts by soldiers who had flown drones to threaten Russian forces with dropped hand grenades. Now they were flying bottles of water and food to people stranded on rooftops.
When several people stumbled ashore from inflatable boats after a night and day spent on rooftops in flooded areas, they said they were visited by drones while waiting.
“I was sitting on the roof of my house when a drone came by and dropped a bottle of mineral water,” said Henadiy Rotar, 59. “In ten minutes another drone came by and dropped a can of meat.” After his location from the drone Once located, a lifeboat soon appeared. “I thought I’d spend another night on the roof,” he said.
Kateryna Krupych, 40, and her son Maksim, 12, and daughter Maria, 4, all came ashore exhausted and barefoot. They were stranded on the roof of an island near the Russian-controlled eastern shore.
On Wednesday, a Ukrainian domestic intelligence unit, in coordination with drone operators, began rescue operations in the area across the raging, swollen river.
Ms Krupych said drones dropped water for the family before her rescue. When the three came ashore, a soldier carrying Maria, a crowd surrounded them and offered sweets to the children.
“One more day and that would have been all,” Maksim said of the time the family spent on the roof without food or water.
Elena Nechai, a lawyer, said the workshop of her husband’s company, which specializes in repairing construction cranes, was flooded. “All the equipment is under water,” she said.
Building the company was “his whole life,” she said. Ms. Nechai waited at the boat dock while her husband paddled out to rescue a guard stranded at the site.
She said the couple had peril insurance, but early in the war the insurance company took pains to point out a clause in the contract clarifying that it did not cover acts of war.
It’s difficult now, she said, to argue that the flood was anything other than an act of war.
Paul Sun contributed to the reporting from Berlin and John Yoon from Seoul.
