UKRAINE: On Tuesday, Ukraine accused Russian forces of blowing up a significant dam and hydroelectric power plant in a region of southern Ukraine that it controls, causing the facility to be breached and threatening serious floods in the process. Thousands of inhabitants were compelled to leave by Ukrainian authorities and move downstream.
Ukrainian authorities have previously issued warnings that the collapse of the Kakhovka dam could release 18 million cubic metres (4.8 billion gallons) of water, which would threaten to flood Kherson and dozens of other communities downriver where hundreds of thousands of people reside. It would also pose a threat to a nearby nuclear power plant that is under Russian control.
The dam blowing up “could have negative consequences for the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant,” according to a statement from Ukraine’s nuclear operator Energoatom, but the situation is now “controllable.”
According to a tweet from the International Atomic Energy Agency of the United Nations, its specialists were closely watching the situation at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant upstream and found “no immediate nuclear safety risk” there.
According to the Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Working Group, a complete failure of the dam would completely wash away much of the left bank, and a major decline in the reservoir may potentially rob the nuclear facility of vital cooling while also drying up the water supply in northern Crimea.
According to Ukrainian officials, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy convened an urgent conference to address the problem. The Kakhovka dam had been destroyed, according to a Telegram post from the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, which also warned against possible misinformation. Residents of 10 villages on the river’s right bank as well as some areas of Kherson were urged to gather their important papers and pets, turn off their appliances, and leave.
In the past, Ukraine and Russia have accused one another of planning assaults specifically to damage the dam, and in October of last year, Zelenskyy warned that Russia would destroy the dam to start a flood. Concerns regarding water flows through and over the Kakhovka dam have been raised for months by authorities, scientists, and locals.