(DW) Ukraine on Tuesday (06/06) accused Russian forces of blowing up a large dam and hydroelectric plant in Kherson, a region of southern Ukraine under Moscow’s control, creating a threat of what Kiev called an “ecological disaster” due to possible massive flooding.
Officials on both sides of the war have ordered hundreds of thousands of residents to withdraw from the region. Russian officials, meanwhile, responded that the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River was damaged by Ukrainian military strikes.
Ukraine’s state-run hydroelectric company said the plant was “completely destroyed” after a detonation inside the engine room. “The station cannot be restored,” it said.
The dam break could have wide-ranging consequences: flooding of villages downstream; water shortages upstream, draining drinking water supplies that supply the south, in Crimea – a peninsula that was annexed by Russia.
Another serious consequence is the reduction in the amount of water available to cool the reactors at Zaporijia, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency wrote on Twitter that its experts were closely monitoring the situation at the plant, and there was “no immediate nuclear safety risk” at the facility.
About 100 villages could be flooded
Ukrainian authorities have already warned that the dam breach could release 18 million cubic meters of water and flood Kherson and dozens of other areas where hundreds of thousands of people live.
The World Data Center for Geoinformatics and Sustainable Development, a Ukrainian non-governmental organization, estimated that about 100 villages and towns would be flooded. It also estimated that the water level would begin to fall only after between five and seven days.
Mykhailo Podolyak, senior advisor to Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski, said that “a global ecological disaster is happening now” and that “thousands of animals and ecosystems will be destroyed in the next few hours.”
Posted videos show the damage caused. One shows a long road being flooded; in another, a beaver can be seen running to high ground to escape the waters.
Zelenski called an emergency meeting to deal with the crisis, Ukrainian officials said.
The Ukrainian Interior Ministry called on residents in ten settlements on the right bank of the Dnipro and parts of the town of Kherson downstream to collect their essential documents and pets, turn off household appliances and leave.
“Terrorist act”
The Russian-installed mayor of the occupied city of New Kakhovka initially denied social media reports that the dam had exploded, but later said that the construction had been bombed in “a serious terrorist act.”
Ukraine controls five of the six dams along the Dnipro, which runs from its northern border with Belarus to the Black Sea and is crucial to the drinking water and electricity supply for the entire country.
Images from what appeared to be a monitoring camera overlooking the dam circulating on social media allegedly show an explosion and the dam breaking.
Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration, said in a video posted on Telegram shortly before 7 a.m. local time that “the Russian army has committed yet another act of terror,” and warned that water will reach “critical levels” within five hours.
md/cn (AP, AP, AFP, DPA, Reuters)