KHERSON, Ukraine (AP) – The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam was a fast-moving disaster that is fast becoming a long-term environmental disaster, affecting drinking water, food supplies and ecosystems stretching as far as the Black Sea.
The near-term dangers can already be seen from space: tens of thousands of parcels of land have been inundated, and more are to come. Experts assume that the long-term consequences will be generational.
For every flooded house and farm, there are fields upon fields of newly planted crops, fruits and vegetables whose irrigation channels have dried up. Thousands of fish were left panting on the mud flats. Young waterbirds lost their nests and their food sources. Countless trees and plants drowned.
If water means life, then the drainage of the Kakhovka reservoir means an uncertain future for the region of southern Ukraine, which was a dry plain until the Dnieper was dammed 70 years ago. The Kakhovka Dam was the last of a system of six Soviet-era dams on the river that flows from Belarus to the Black Sea.
Then, after the Russian invasion last year, the Dnieper became part of the front line.
“This entire area formed its own ecosystem, including the reservoir,” said Kateryna Filiuta, a protected habitats expert at the Ukraine Nature Conservation Group.
SHORT TERM
Ihor Medunov is an essential part of this ecosystem. His work as a hunting and fishing guide practically ended with the start of the war, but he stayed on his small island compound with his four dogs because it seemed safer than the alternative. Still, for months he was troubled by the realization that Russian troops controlled the dam downstream.
The six dams along the Dnieper were designed to work in tandem, adapting to rising and falling water levels from one season to the next. When Russian troops captured the Kakhovka Dam, the entire system fell into oblivion.
Whether intentionally or simply carelessly, Russian forces allowed the water level to fluctuate uncontrollably. In winter they dropped dangerously low and then reached historic highs as snowmelt and spring rains collected in the reservoir. Until Monday, the water sloshed in Medunow’s living room.
Now, with the destruction of the dam, he is seeing his livelihood literally dwindle. The waves that were on his doorstep a week ago are now just a muddy walk away.
“The water is disappearing before our eyes,” he told The Associated Press. “Everything that was in my house, that we worked our lives for, is all gone. First it drowned, and as the water drained away it rotted.”
Since the dam collapsed on Tuesday, torrential waters have uprooted land mines, breached weapons and ammunition depots and flushed 150 tons of machine oil into the Black Sea. Entire cities were flooded to the roofs and thousands of animals died in a large national park now under Russian occupation.
Rainbow-colored layers of mud are already covering the murky, calm waters around flooded Kherson, the capital of the province of the same name in southern Ukraine. Abandoned homes reek of decay as cars, first floor rooms and basements continue to be flooded. Huge oil slicks, seen in aerial photographs, stretch across the river from the city’s port and industrial complexes, highlighting the magnitude of the Dnieper’s new pollution problem.
According to estimates by Ukraine’s Ministry of Agriculture, there were 10,000 hectares of arable land under water in the Ukrainian-controlled territory of the Kherson province, and “several times more” in the Russian-occupied territory.
Farmers are already feeling the pain of the disappearing reservoir. Dmytro Neveselyi, mayor of the village of Maryinske, said everyone in the community of 18,000 people would be affected within a few days.
“Today and tomorrow we can supply the population with drinking water,” he said. After that, who knows. “The channel that supplied our water reservoir has also stopped flowing.”
LONG TERM
On Friday, the water slowly began to recede, only to reveal the looming environmental catastrophe.
The 18 cubic km (14.5 million acre-feet) reservoir was the final stop on a hundreds of kilometers long river that flowed through Ukraine’s industrial and agricultural heartland. For decades, its river carried the runoff of chemicals and pesticides that settled in the mud at the bottom.
Ukrainian authorities are testing the toxic levels of the dirt, which could turn into toxic dust by the start of summer, said Eugene Simonov, an environmental scientist with the Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Working Group, a nonprofit organization of activists and researchers.
The amount of long-term damage depends on the movement of front lines in an unpredictable war. Can the dam and reservoir be restored if fighting continues there? Should the region be allowed to become a dry plain again?
Deputy Foreign Minister Andriy Melnyk of Ukraine described the destruction of the dam as “the worst environmental disaster in Europe since the Chernobyl disaster”.
The fish and waterfowl that have become dependent on the reservoir “will lose most of their spawning and feeding grounds,” Simonov said.
Below the dam lie about 50 protected areas, including three national parks, said Simonov, who in October co-authored an article warning of the potentially catastrophic consequences both upstream and downstream if the Kakhovka Dam were damaged.
According to Filiuta, it will take a decade for plant and animal populations to return and adjust to their new reality. And possibly longer for the millions of Ukrainians who lived there.
In Maryinske, the farming community, they search archives for records of old wells, which they dig up, clean and analyze to see if the water is still drinkable.
“Because an area without water becomes a desert,” said the mayor.
In addition, all of Ukraine will have to grapple with the question of whether to restore the reservoir or to think differently about the future of the region, its water supply and a large part of the territory suddenly vulnerable to invasive species – just like it is in the Invasion prone That caused the disaster in the first place.
“The worst consequences are not likely to hit us directly, not me, not you, but rather our future generations, because this man-made catastrophe is not transparent,” Filiuta said. “The consequences that will come will be for our children or grandchildren, just as we are now the ones who experience the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster, and not our ancestors.”
___
Hinnant reported from Paris. Novikov reported from Kyiv. Jamey Keaten in Kiev and Volodymyr Yurchuk in Kherson, Ukraine contributed to this report.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine