On what should have been a Kherson street corner, Larysa Musian, a hydrologist, sits and watches the flood waters rising. The Dnipro River used to be 300-400 metres away, but after the dam at Nova Kakhovka was breached at 2.50am on Tuesday, it has burst into the city, flooding the first two or three blocks of the lowest lying quarter.
Every half hour, Musian rises from her stool, carrying a square charcoal grey ruler. The water, she says, is rising “6 to 8cm every half hour” and is 3 metres above where it was before the dam burst. She phones through her figures to colleagues in the regional monitoring centre in nearby Mykolaiv.
