The people living along Ukraine’s lower Dnipro River must contend with the immediate consequences of the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam and flee for safety with whatever they can salvage, but the wider impact could make itself felt for generations.
Downstream, the flood waters will subside somewhat as the surge reaches the Black Sea, but many of the villages and towns along the course of the Dnipro may not be habitable again unless and until a new dam is built. Thousands of homes and livelihoods have been swept away, along with countless domesticated and wild animals.
The ecological trauma of such an inundation of water and silt has changed the landscape in an instant, wiping away islands and wetlands. It could take years if not decades for the fauna and flora to bounce back. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, called it the “largest man-made environmental disaster in Europe in decades”. It is the country’s misfortune to have also been the site of the Chornobyl disaster in 1986, arguably the last calamity on such a scale.
With a reservoir of 18bn cubic metres, Nova Kakhovka was one the dams with the largest capacity in the world, according to Mohammad Heidarzadeh, a senior lecturer in the architecture and civil engineering department at the UK’s University of Bath. It was 90 times bigger than the largest dam reservoir in Britain, the Kielder dam in Northumberland.
“It is obvious that the failure of this dam will definitely have extensive long-term ecological and environmental negative consequences not only for Ukraine but for neighbouring countries and regions,” Heidarzadeh said.
Along with all the debris carried along by the rushing waters are tens of thousands of mines. The flood waters are rolling through a frontline in the war. The banks of the Dnipro have been frontlines since at least November, when Ukrainian forces drove the Russians across the river to the southern bank. Both sides laid mines along the waterfront and they have now been washed away and will be distributed randomly in towns, villages and farmland downstream. A flood means civilians can be blown up many kilometres from a conflict zone, many years after the war.
In Mykolaiv oblast, the Halo Trust charity was clearing mines along the Inhulets River, a Dnipro tributary, before it was hit by the flood surge.
“The Russians laid the anti-tank mines at the lowest points of the Inhulets River to prevent Ukrainian troops from crossing in vehicles until Mykolaiv was liberated in November 2022,” Jasmine Dann, the Halo location manager for Mykolaiv, said. “These mines are now posing a fatal risk to civilians who are returning to their homes or use the fertile banks to graze their animals, cultivate crops and fish. Our demining teams regularly cross the river to access minefields, but if the river levels rise significantly as a result of this morning’s [dam collapse], these areas will be cut off and we will be unable to clear the mines.”
The devastation upstream from the dam is the other side of the coin from the downstream floods – a dearth of water. The level of the Kakhovka reservoir is falling dramatically. Within a few days it will be too low for the water pumps at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, about 120 miles (200km) upstream, to be used to cool its reactor cores and spent fuel stocks. Because the six reactors have shut down and the plant has a very large cooling pool for such an emergency, it should be able to maintain safety for several months at least, as long as the pond remains intact. But that is far from given. The pond, like the plant itself, is in Russian hands.
The loss of the reservoir will also mean there will be far less drinking water for cities in the region and irrigation for the agricultural belt around it. A drop of just one metre is enough for traps to run dry. That will have a knock-on effect on food production, and on exports of wheat, corn, sunflower oil and soya beans, to the rest of the world.
The Kakhovka reservoir “was the heart of one of the largest irrigation systems in Europe” and its water “made it possible to grow up to 80% of all vegetables in Ukraine and a significant percentage of fruits and grapes”, according to the agricultural thinktank, EastFruit.
One of the affected areas is Crimea, which Russia has occupied since 2014. The canal that supplies water to the peninsula has its intake just above the Nova Kakhovka dam. Crimea’s reservoirs have been topped up in recent months so there will not be an immediate crisis, but over the coming year, it may render the maintenance of a civilian population and an army there untenable, possibly even forcing a withdrawal without a shot being fired. The grim irony of that is unlikely to be lost on Ukrainians.
