In the grips of this disaster zone, thousands of homes remain underwater, and there are fears of infectious, water-borne diseases spreading. As Network for Animals have stated; “We must continue our rescue efforts!”
As St. Francis Of Assisi said, “If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.”
The collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine is one of the biggest industrial and ecological disasters in Europe for decades.
As CNN reported:
The catastrophe has destroyed entire villages, flooded farmland, deprived tens of thousands of people of power and clean water, and caused massive environmental damage.
The damage is also affecting the area north of the reservoir, where water levels are falling.
The collapse has left 94% of irrigation systems in Kherson, 74% in Zaporizhzhia and 30% in Dnipro regions “without a source of water,” according to the Ukrainian Agricultural Ministry.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant also lies upstream from the destroyed dam. The reservoir supplies cooling water to the plant, Europe’s largest nuclear power station, and is crucial for its safety.
The plant is under Russian control, which has been a major source of anxiety for the Ukrainians, still scared by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which still casts its long shadow across Eastern Europe and the rest of the world.
As the BBC reported in 2019, the events at Chernobyl were covered up by the secretive Soviet authorities at the time but the true number of deaths and illnesses caused by the nuclear accident are only now becoming clear.
The BBC also reported back in February 2023, how in June 2022, satellite images captured hundreds of craters made by artillery shells and a 40m-wide (131 ft) hole left by a bomb in fields around the village of Dovhenke, in eastern Ukraine.
It is just one site left scarred by Russia’s invasion of its neighbour. And as the war continues to wreak a devastating humanitarian toll on the people caught up in the fighting, the conflict is leaving a far less obvious, toxic legacy on the land itself.
Amongst the pockmarked landscape and burned-out buildings of Dovhenke, heavy metals, fuel and chemical residues from ammunition and missiles have seeped into the soil.
The Ukrainian government has asked the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to help it assess the environmental damage being done by the conflict.
Preliminary monitoring by the agency and its partners suggest that urban and rural landscapes could be left with a “toxic legacy for generations to come”.
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