On banks of environmental disaster, Ukrainians try to stand strong

From Nataliia Shatilova’s perspective, Russia’s eight-month occupation of her city of Kherson in southeastern Ukraine last year had the unintended effect of steeling residents to face the challenge of floodwaters that have inundated riverfront neighborhoods over the last week.

“We went through the occupation, and during the occupation people very quickly built a strong level of independence and resistance to the occupying forces, and that built a strong sense of determination and self-reliance among our communities,” says Ms. Shatilova, deputy director of the Kherson regional operations of the Ukrainian Red Cross.

Add to that the past six months of almost daily shelling from Russian forces just across the Dnipro River, she says, and people have been prepared to confront what she calls the “third difficult situation” to besiege Kherson in less than two years: the Dnipro’s devastating flooding following the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka Dam.

As water from a heavy rain pours into the bombed-out southern facade of the government building the Red Cross has converted into flood response headquarters, Ms. Shatilova lists the area’s unfilled needs for food, medicines, and dry shelter.

But she also underscores Kherson’s fortitude and optimism, qualities that have surprised even her.

“People are in good spirits,” she says. “They are taking this situation with the destroyed dam as another challenge that we here in Kherson will overcome.”

The catastrophic flooding followed destruction June 6 of the Nova Kakhovka Dam and hydroelectric power plant, about 60 miles up the Dnipro from Kherson.

The dam’s collapse quickly drained what had been one of Europe’s largest reservoirs, created in the Soviet era decades before Ukraine’s independence to supply water to heavy industry and to enable large-scale irrigation of Ukraine’s fertile but dry southern steppes. The reservoir also supplied fresh water to Crimea.

Ukraine and Russia continue to blame each other for the dam’s destruction, although indications that an internal explosion of the Russian-controlled facility caused the failure could suggest Russian responsibility.

Both sides insist the other was motivated to unleash the reservoir’s waters by Ukraine’s long-anticipated counteroffensive to retake occupied territory, which launched last week. Russia may have caused the breach to stall and complicate the counteroffensive, some say, while others speculate that Ukraine acted with the intent of flooding entrenched Russian forces.

Whichever is accurate, the undisputed outcome of the destruction is an environmental calamity for southern Ukraine that some experts warn could equal the impact of the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine.

The flooding inundated more than 200 square miles of land downstream in both Ukrainian and Russian-occupied territory – submerging dozens of villages and riverfront neighborhoods of Kherson and sending a dangerous and toxic stew of dislodged landmines, chemicals, and untreated sewage from overwhelmed systems into the Black Sea and west along Ukraine’s southern coast to the port city of Odesa.

Officials voice concerns that the fetid waters could have dire health and economic impacts – on farming and fishing, for example.

More long term, the flooding and loss of extensive irrigation systems could leave thousands of acres stripped of their rich topsoil, and result in a desertification of farmlands that have helped make Ukraine one of the world’s most productive breadbaskets.

But for now, in Kherson’s flooded neighborhoods, the focus is on cleanup, recovery, and pitching in to help flooded neighbors.

“We’ve been through everything, so we won’t put our hands down now,” says Nataliia Bespogaynaia as she employs her rubber-gloved hands to scrub the floodwater-soaked fixtures of a friend’s market in Kherson’s riverfront Antonivka district.

The little market, which once served patrons of a nearby beach and motorists crossing a now-destroyed bridge to the Russian-occupied east bank of the Dnipro, hasn’t been open for months. But Ms. Bespogaynaia says she decided to help the store’s owner clean up from the filthy waters that at one point were waist-deep – and to prepare for the day when the store might serve the surrounding area once again.

“We are lifetime optimists!” she says, gesturing to her two friends who joined her for the cleanup. That draws a broad smile from Sasha Kondratenko, clad in shorts and rubber slides, who adds his own upbeat note.

“We are now Venice!” he says, repeating the lemons-to-lemonade line that has become popular in Kherson.

Which is not to say the three friends aren’t concerned for the area’s future.

Mr. Kondratenko points out the submerged houses across the street closer to the river and wonders aloud what will be salvageable. He worries about the public health ramifications of the untreated sewage and chemicals.

And he wonders if the many species of fish and animals the area boasted of just a week ago might have disappeared. “We just don’t know what to expect for the future,” he says.

For biologists and ecologists, the dam collapse has already destroyed the unique estuary system at the Dnipro’s Black Sea mouth and will lead to severe health and environmental impacts beyond Ukraine to Bulgaria, Turkey, and other Black Sea-fronting countries.

“People are comparing this to the Chernobyl power plant disaster, but this is a very different kind of environmental catastrophe with a wider range of impacts,” says Vladislav Balinskiy, a biologist and head of the Ukrainian environmental nongovernmental organization Green Leaf.

As he takes stock in Odesa of the piles of river reeds and other debris clogging one of the city’s normally unencumbered sandy beaches, Mr. Balinskiy notes that as terrible as Chernobyl was, it did not irretrievably alter the surrounding landscape. Over time dissipation of radioactivity has allowed nature to recover.

“But here the very particular and unique natural systems that made up the Dnipro River’s estuaries have vanished, carried away to beaches like this one,” he says. “They just don’t exist anymore.”

Indeed, the flooding destroyed the 200,000-acre Lower Dnipro River National Park, an internationally recognized jewel that was home to unusual and even unique plant and animal species. Those include the frog and lizard species, some of which were already endangered, that Mr. Balinskiy has found over the past week along Odesa’s shoreline.

As for economic impact, he notes that nearly 2.5 million acres of irrigated farmland depended on the reservoir. “Where before we were growing crops, we could now have dust storms,” he says.

Another calamitous result of the dam collapse was the washing away to flooded downriver communities and the Black Sea more than 50 years of accumulated sediments on the Kakhovka reservoir’s bottom.

Mr. Balinskiy points out that insecticides and other agricultural chemicals that were banned in the United States beginning in the 1960s were used on Soviet Ukraine’s rapidly expanding croplands into the 1990s. The sediment buildup, which in some places reached more than 50 feet deep, also held the polluted and untreated waste of heavy industries the Soviets placed along the reservoir’s perimeter.

“Now all those insecticides and chemicals and bacteria that have developed have been washed into the Black Sea,” he says. “We don’t know what the impact will be,” he says, “but we do know what precious natural systems we have lost.”

In Kherson’s riverfront communities, people have heard of and are discussing the many dire consequences the dam collapse will have beyond their flooded homes and muddy streets, says Sergei Ivaschenko, a community leader in Antonivka village.

The potential public health ramifications are especially worrisome for many residents, he says.

But then his demeanor brightens. “These people have lived through the occupation and the shelling, so now they are not afraid of anything,” he says – not even a disaster that he says can only be called “an act of terrorism.”

Reporting for this story was supported by Oleksandr Naselenko.