Floods from Ukraine dam breach engulf more war-torn areas as hundreds flee
Large areas are underwater with thousands of people evacuated in southern Ukraine. Emma Murphy in Kyiv reports on the devastation
Floodwaters from a collapsed dam kept rising in southern Ukraine on Wednesday, forcing hundreds of people to flee their homes in a major emergency operation that brought a dramatic new dimension to the war with Russia.
Hundreds of thousands of residents in the Ukrainian-controlled area of Kherson were ordered to evacuate following the incident at the major dam and hydroelectric power station on Tuesday.
Ukraine has accused Russia of blowing up the dam, which sits in an area Moscow has controlled for more than a year.
But the Russians say it was Ukrainian sabotage - designed to distract from Kyiv's long-awaited counter-offensive.
On Wednesday a rescue truck was overwhelmed by the water, forcing relief workers and flooding victims to be helped out of the vehicle.
Some residents clung to each other to keep from falling into the rising tide. One man chucked his German shepherd from the roof of a stalled truck onto another.
But as the evacuees began to leave their ruined homes behind, the sound of other dogs abandoned in floodwater can be heard.
Local Svitlana Telenda was one of the many forced to flee.
Ms Telenda said: "I kept sitting, hoping that I could stay. Then the water began to run with such force that my son got a boat from a neighbour and we got out."
Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of Kherson Regional Military administration said the intensity of the floods was decreasing, but warned “due to the significant destruction of the dam, the water will keep coming.”
Satellite images show the areas now inundated with flood water from the vast reservoir unleashed by the destruction of the Kahovka dam, contaminating drinking water.
Ukrainian officials say that as many as 80 towns and villages - across an area of nearly a thousand square miles between the dam and the Black Sea coast, are still at risk of flooding, and hundreds of thousands of people face losing their normal access to drinking water.
The explosion has added to an already dire situation - no sooner had a group of evacuees reached dry land, they were having to take cover from the shelling.
As the rescue effort continues, so does the war.
Ukraine is a globally significant producer of grain, but the dam's destruction could significantly disrupt this.
Ukraine's agriculture ministry has warned that the loss of the dam will leave half a million hectares of land, an area about the size of Devon, without irrigation - turning fields of wheat into deserts by this time next year.
The price of wheat has already jumped.
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