‘It looks like a desert’ – the Kakhovka reservoir after the dam was blow up by the Russian army For seven decades a vast reservoir has dominated the landscape here, Europe’s second biggest. Not anymore. Where there had just been water, vast sandbanks stretch into the distance. It looks like a desert. We crossed the barren landscape with Andriy Starko an engineer whose job is to pump the water out of the reservoir. We stood next to a vast intake. It should be sucking water out of the reservoir at the rate of four million litres an hour. Instead, it’s a stagnant green pool. The odd fish flops languidly in the foul-smelling waters. How did you feel when you heard they’d blown the dam the journalist asked him. “I didn’t believe that that something like that could happen. I can’t believe that a human brain can even consider that kind of barbaric act. I just can’t believe that,” he said. Andriy knows thousands of hectares of farmland depend on the water he can no longer pump. He fears for his own future too. And there is something else worrying him and everyone here. Shimmering in the distance across the sand the tall chimneys of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. Andriy voiced a concern you hear more and more here, and now the Ukrainian government has warned the Russians have mined part of the power plant and could blow it up next. “You can expect anything from them. I don’t think they are a civilised people. They’re just unpredictable. I’m worried yes I’m really worried,” he added. Inside the pumping station where Andriy works, or used to at least, it looks like a scene from Chornobyl before disaster struck. Big Soviet era machines sit idle. They should be throbbing with noise pumping water out of the reservoir and into canals, gallons of it every hour now that harvest is only a few months away. Not now. The pressure dials on the machines stand at zero. There’s just bird noise. The water should be going into a vast network of canals in the months before harvest. More than a million acres of farmland depends on canals on both sides of the reservoir for irrigation, land that produces two million tons of grain a year. Ukraine may be famous for its rich black soil but it’s not much use without water. 2. This is what cities in the villages of Kherson region look like after the water recedes 3. Beryslav. Before the Russians blew up the Kakhovka HPP, the Dnipro River used to flow here
Source: Sky News
Source: Okolo TV
Source: Most.Ks.Ua
