Sunset alongside the Kakhovka Reservoir in central Ukraine, particularly in summer time, was attractive: children performed within the shallow water close to the shore, males fished and younger {couples} walked underneath the pine bushes because the final traces of daylight mirrored off the water.

But after the destruction of a serious dam simply downriver, that shimmering lake, one among Europe’s largest, merely disappeared. Now all that continues to be is a 150-mile-long meadow.

For 60-plus years, the Bezhan household ran a fishing enterprise on these shores. They purchased boats, nets, freezers and massive rumbling ice-making machines, and technology after technology made a dwelling off the fish. But now there aren’t any fish.

“If the war ended tomorrow, and I don’t think it will,” mentioned Serhii Bezhan, the household’s broad-chested patriarch, “it would take five years to rebuild that dam and then at least two more for the reservoir to fill up. Then it would take another 10 years for the fish to grow — for some species, 20.”

He appeared away as his eyes misted up.

“I’m 50,” he mentioned quietly. “I don’t know if I’ll even be around that long.”

On June 6, seismic meters tons of of miles away detected an infinite explosion on the Kakhovka dam alongside the Dnipro River. The bolstered concrete partitions, greater than 60 toes excessive and as a lot as 100 toes thick, crumbled, and 4.8 trillion gallons of water gushed out.

Scientific proof signifies that the dam was blown up from the inside, virtually actually by the Russian forces occupying it. In one stroke, they unleashed epic floods on Ukraine and an ensuing drought that, taken collectively, introduced a shocking stage of destruction to the setting, the financial system and the lives of civilians already enduring the hardships of battle.

This summer time, a crew of New York Times journalists traveled tons of of miles from Zaporizhzhia in central Ukraine to Odesa on the Black Sea to evaluate the total influence. What we discovered had been houses nonetheless soggy and smeared with mud; lifeless fish mendacity in droves; underwater mollusk colonies destroyed; a drinking-water disaster; an irrigation disaster for farmers; whole communities with out work; and a yawning sense of loss whose dimensions haven’t but been established.

During this battle, the Russians have intentionally bombed energy vegetation and grain silos, leaving no scarcity of scorched-earth brutality. But the destruction of the Kakhovka dam stands out as maybe the one most devastating and punitive blow even when the army intent was to flood the world and decelerate Ukrainian troops. The method Ukrainians see it, the invading Russians are merely expressing a hatred of the land — and the folks — that they’re claiming as theirs.

This was a “katastrofa,” Mr. Bezan mentioned.

With no fish to catch, his household has been relegated to choosing fruit from their orchard and promoting it alongside the highway.

Studying the Past

Dmytro Neveselyi, the towering younger mayor of Zelenodolsk, seems extra like knowledgeable basketball participant than town administrator of a small city within the Ukrainian heartland. One afternoon this summer time, he leaned over his desk and unfurled a World War II-era map.

Mr. Neveselyi and different civic leaders have been combing outdated maps like this one to find wells and different potential sources of water that this space used when there was no dam.

“This is from the Nazis,” he defined, with a touch of amusement. “It’s the last good image we have of this area before the dam was built.”

The Kakhovka dam was an engineering marvel of its time, a mammoth challenge emblematic of the Soviet impulse to construct larger, if not at all times higher. Completed in 1956, the hydroelectric dam blocked the Dnipro River to generate electrical energy. The water that backed up created the Kakhovka Reservoir, which irrigated farms and offered ingesting water to central Ukraine’s rising cities.

When the reservoir ran dry, an enormous swath of Ukraine was left with out operating water. People stopped doing laundry. Some even used plastic luggage to go to the lavatory.

Since then, some water service has been restored by connecting pipes to different, a lot smaller reservoirs. But hundreds of individuals nonetheless lack clear ingesting water and are on the mercy of water vehicles that make the rounds.

So the seek for different water sources goes on.

The map that Mr. Neveselyi opened on his desk was a surprisingly clear black and white aerial picture taken by the Luftwaffe, the German air pressure, which was ultimately found by American researchers and posted on-line.

It all appears laborious to consider, he mentioned.

“I spent my entire life on this waterside,” he mentioned, as he walked alongside the dried-up lakeshore. “I still don’t believe what I’m actually seeing.”

A Farming Disaster

The huge agricultural heartland across the reservoir produced greater than eight billion kilos of wheat, corn, soybeans and sunflowers and 80 p.c of Ukraine’s greens annually, the Ukrainian authorities mentioned. The reservoir was significantly chargeable for that, irrigating greater than 2,000 sq. miles.

“I don’t mean to be too pessimistic,” mentioned Volodymyr Halia, a industrial farmer close to the city of Apostolove. “But I haven’t heard any solutions for irrigation. These farms will dry up unless we rebuild the dam.”

Right now, that’s unattainable. The Russians nonetheless management the world.

So the losses maintain stacking up. This space’s farmers used to export their grain on river barges that tied up alongside the reservoir’s shores. The docks are nonetheless there. But as a substitute of overlooking water, they sit astride miles of mud.

It’s troublesome to understand how a lot of a “katasrofa” the dam breach can be. The Kyiv School of Economics, together with Ukraine’s authorities, believes the assault price at least $2 billion in direct losses, a toll that can almost definitely improve as instances goes on.

“People were already so tired and stressed from a year of war,” mentioned Tamara Nevdah, a neighborhood official who lives close to the reservoir. “When this happened, people felt as horrible and demoralized as they did the first day of the war.”

“And they’re still in shock,” she added.

‘Ecocide’

The Kahovka Reservoir was a wonderland for birds. It served as a method station for migratory species on their journeys from northern climes to Africa. Islands within the lake and marshy areas downriver had been nesting websites for nice herons, shiny ibises, Eurasian spoonbills and others, mentioned Oleksii Vasyliuk, an ecologist and zoologist.

But when the torrent of water cascaded downstream, it worn out numerous nesting websites, and the birds who used to nest close to the lake have vanished as effectively.

“We lost an entire generation,” Mr. Vasyliuk mentioned.

Ukrainian environmentalists are additionally involved a couple of uncommon species of ant that lived within the Lower Dnipro National Nature Park the place chunks of the swamp have been washed away, and Nordmann’s birch mouse, a tiny, threatened mammal of the steppe whose habitat within the Oleshky Sands National Nature Park was overwhelmed by floodwaters.

In Odesa, 90 miles west of the place the Dnipro flows into the Black Sea, Vladyslav Balinskyi, an ecologist, walked alongside the shore, obtrusive at beachgoers.

“Nobody should be swimming,” he mentioned. “They don’t know what’s in that water.”

He rattled off pollution that the flood had dumped into the ocean: cadmium, strontium, mercury, lead, pesticides, fertilizers and 150 tons of machine oil used within the hydroelectric plant’s large gears.

Nearly each day he dives to survey the influence on marine life.

“Fifty percent of the mussels have already died,” he mentioned.

‘All Gone. Nothing. Trash.’

Liudmyla Mavrych stood in her lounge, clutching a soggy scrapbook. A village clerk, she spent a lot of her life in the identical little home in Afanansiivka, a quiet, fairly hamlet alongside a Dnipro tributary downriver from the dam.

The wallpaper was peeling off her partitions. The linoleum was peeling off her counters. Mud was smeared throughout her flooring. The entire home smelled like an outdated, mildewy rag.

Floodwaters had swallowed her residence, like hundreds of others.

“Useless,” she mentioned, peeling moist, sticky images out of a scrapbook. One by one, she flung them to the ground.

“We lost our home, we lost everything we owned and now we don’t even have any memories,” she mentioned, getting extra upset as she quickly flipped by the damp picture album. “All gone. Nothing. Trash.”

‘Help!’

Kherson, a port metropolis on the Dnipro’s west financial institution, was one of the vital flood-ravaged locations in Ukrainian-controlled territory. Photos from these first days present rooftops protruding from the water.

But it was on the opposite financial institution, the east financial institution, occupied by Russian troops, the place many extra persons are believed to have died.

Mykhailo Puryshev, an skilled humanitarian employee, was one of many few Ukrainian civilians who dared to rescue folks on the Russian aspect. According to video footage and an interview he gave, he sped throughout the river in a pink boat carrying a pink helmet.

“I wanted to make sure the Russians saw me so they wouldn’t shoot me,” he mentioned.

When he arrived in Oleshky, in Russian-controlled territory, he noticed folks standing on their rooftops, surrounded by water, waving white flags and shouting, “Help!”

According to the Ukrainian and Russian authorities, dozens died on the east bank of the river. Mr. Puryshev mentioned some had been disabled individuals who had drowned of their houses.

He rescued 10 youngsters and two canine after which bought out.

“The Russians didn’t do anything,” he mentioned. “I didn’t see a single soldier anywhere.”

Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Evelina Riabenko contributed reporting from a number of websites affected by the dam’s destruction.