(C) OpenDemocracy
This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Kherson: Life in a flooded city [1]
[]
Date: 2023-07
Lately, Max has asked me to bring him the same things from Kyiv every time I come to Kherson: canned cat food, a special brand of terrible cigarettes and inexpensive fruit beer. You can buy all of this in the southern Ukrainian city but his schedule – he runs transport for the regional energy company – isn’t quite aligned with that of the supermarkets.
I grew up in Kherson, but these days I return as a journalist – to report on evacuations, liberation from Russian occupation, mass shelling and the dam explosion. Together with my colleague Vladimir Senchenko, a cameraman, I manage to buy almost everything Max requested on our journey south.
We enter the city late on 6 June, after the nightly curfew has begun. The next morning, a whole day has passed since the destruction of the Kakhovka dam. The city’s river-facing streets are gradually sinking into the water.
I have to drag the canned cat food and beer around with me all week. There is simply not enough time to deliver them to Max, though we rush several times a day past the old apartment block where he lives with his cats.
Get the free oDR newsletter A weekly summary of our latest stories about the post-Soviet world. Sign up now
Still, my former classmate waits patiently. Max, it seems, is the only person who does not constantly message me with the same meaningless questions (‘How are you?’, ‘What's going on there?’) in the course of this week. But on the third day of the explosion, literally a minute after Russian mines hit Kherson’s main evacuation point, Max gives in and calls to ask a short question: are you guys safe?
This past spring, Max lost two repair teams at his energy company, three people each: one team was blown up by a landmine, the second died in a shelling. Now, his apartment, frozen in the middle of a pre-war renovation, has become home to another colleague from work. Andriy used to live in Komyshany, a village outside Kherson, but since the Kakhovka dam explosion his house has been flooded.
A week after the explosion, Andriy shows me a photo on his phone of how the water level gradually rose, flooding the garden, sheds and the outside kitchen he used in summer. He is interrupted by a call from his wife. She, like many other relatives of the electricians restoring Kherson’s infrastructure, is waiting out the war elsewhere. Kherson has been a frontline city since its liberation last November.
As Andriy goes into the other room to take the call, Max pours out the rest of the brandy that I brought him in the spring. We begin to recall the numerous horror stories, rumours and legends that have swirled around the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station, dam and reservoir since it was built in the mid-1950s.
“The last time they panicked a lot, I think, was in 2000,” Max smiles. “Everyone was afraid that the dam would break with a computer failure due to the millennium. Since then I remembered what the engineers told us: if the dam breaks, only the lower quarters of Kherson will be flooded, the right bank will get little at all. But honestly, I didn’t think that I would ever see it with my own eyes.”
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/kherson-life-flooded-city-kakhovka-dam/
Published and (C) by OpenDemocracy
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/
