Global Courant
On the day the waters began to rise in war-ravaged Kherson, Lora Mysiyan, one of the southern Ukrainian city’s hydrologists, knew she was wearing the wrong outfit. She was wearing a dress.
That didn’t stop her from wading into the cold, murky waters of the Dnipro River as it overflowed its banks and began to engulf entire neighborhoods. According to the United Nations, about 20 percent of the municipality was still under water on Thursday.
The first hours of the disaster – caused by the destruction of the Soviet-era Kakhovka Dam on June 6 – remain etched in Mysyan’s memory.
She said she couldn’t believe it when her boss told her that the dam upstream of Kherson – a town with a pre-war population of 289,000 – had been destroyed.
Lora Mysiyan (left), a hydrologist in Kherson, Ukraine, is accompanied by a soldier, a police officer and a member of the media as she returns from checking the falling level of the Dnipro River on June 15, 2023. (Murray Brewster /CBC News)
Mysiyan, 56, told CBC News she grabbed her tools and went to the riverbank to start measuring. At that time, there was already water on the nearby square.
Citizens gathered. She said she knew it was bad but couldn’t show fear.
“We didn’t know what the level would be. We were running from point to point,” she told CBC News through a translator on Thursday. At one point, she said, she had to “pick up” the hem of her dress as she pushed through the floodwaters.
“I wasn’t wearing pants that time. And I was thinking (about) all the time what I would look like. It doesn’t matter (how) this happens… everyone can see I don’t panic.”
Mysiyan said the water rose so fast that her normal metering system was rendered useless. She started marking the height of the water on buildings with a red waterproof marker.
“I had to come up with my own system,” she said.
Lora Mysiyan, a hydrologist in Kherson, Ukraine, takes notes after measuring the latest flood water levels in the city on June 15, 2023. (Murray Brewster/CBC News)
Over the next few days, Mysiyan mapped the flooding and kept authorities informed as water poured through the shell-strewn streets. She often did so under artillery fire from the other side of the river, where Russian troops have dug in since last fall after being pushed out of the part of the city on the left bank of the Dnipro.
When the water level began to drop, she rescued a black dog from the soupy mud that now covers the streets. He now follows her everywhere.
Mysiyan and another colleague continue to map the receding waters. She is followed by an army of municipal workers – clad in body armor often draped by orange construction vets – who shovel away the mud, hose down the streets and slowly reclaim the city block by block.
The battle to clear Kherson takes place under constant shellfire.
City workers and volunteers in body armor shovel mud from the sidewalks in Kherson as floodwaters recede on June 15, 2023. (Murray Brewster/CBC News)
Pushing the sludge downhill, the workers advance into the Russian-held territory on the other side of the river.
Rescue and evacuation operations continue to search for people trapped in parts of the city that are still under water. Dozens of evacuees and a handful of hospital patients left the city by train on Thursday.
An elderly couple, Oleksandr Manakovskiy and Nataliya Bilousova, were transferred by ambulance to the central station with the help of the Red Cross.
Manakovskiy, who was in the back of the vehicle, said he was scared when he saw the water reach his doorstep. When he was on the train late Thursday afternoon, he said, he felt safer but worried about where he was going and what would happen next.
“I don’t know what to expect since I haven’t even seen what’s out there,” he said, referring to other parts of Ukraine.
Like many other elderly residents, Manakovsky stoically and stubbornly endured the Russian occupation last year. Many who remained in the city were too sick or poor to leave, or were simply determined to stay home.
Svitlana Kovtun, 54, counted herself among those determined to stay during the occupation and hold on to what they had built all their lives.
And then came the flood.
“It’s really painful,” Kovtun told CBC News outside a humanitarian shelter. ‘I try not to think about this. My whole house has gone under water, everything we have gained through life.’
She is now staying with a friend who has fled the city.
International aid organizations participating in the relief effort are still grappling with the magnitude of the disaster. They say the loss of the city’s reservoir will have a dizzying impact on the daily lives of people across the region.
An aerial view shows houses flooded and contaminated by oil in a neighborhood of Kherson, Ukraine, on June 10, 2023. The destruction of the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine is rapidly developing into a long-term environmental disaster. It affects drinking water, food supplies and ecosystems that reach as far as the Black Sea. (Associated Press)
“The situation here in southern Ukraine is currently dramatic, especially because of the lack of water,” said Saviano Abreu, a spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Ukraine.
“The Kakhovka reservoir was the source of drinking water for about 700,000 people not only in Kherson, but is also the main source in (nearby) Mykolaiv. So 700,000 people are now at risk of not having enough drinking water in their homes every day. the disaster.”
As bad as the situation is on the Ukrainian side of the river, Abreu said, it could be even worse in Russian-controlled territory.
“We don’t have enough access. We don’t have the means to verify the information we receive,” he said.
LOOK | In Kherson, Ukrainians face both flooding and Russian shelling:
Kherson residents measure flood damage, clean up after Kakhovka dam breach
The war-weary Ukrainian city of Kherson is still dealing with massive flooding and damage more than a week after the collapse of a major dam. CBC News has a team on the ground that spoke to those struggling to pick up the pieces.
Ukrainian President Voldymyr Zelensky has criticized the response of international aid agencies to the crisis in the occupied territory. Abreau said he understands why.
“This is a desperate situation for everyone,” he said. “And I would expect no less from the government to put pressure on international organizations, including us, to ensure that people in desperate or dramatic situations can get the support they need.”
