Jeremy's Blog 9th June 2023: The Kakhovka Dam Breach
This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 8th June 2023
It is hard this week not to dwell on Ukraine. The CAAV’s National Conference at Oxford on 7th July is to receive a presentation, The Impact of the War on Agricultural Valuation in Ukraine, from Victor Zayats, an agricultural specialist member of the Ukrainian Society of Appraisers. I was discussing this with him and other Ukrainian valuers on Tuesday morning just after the news of the blowing of the Kakhovka Dam came through, its enormous scale making the subject even more immediate but following so much destruction and contamination already across so much of Ukraine.
The force of over 4 cubic miles of water was unleashed down the Dnipro river, its estuary, back up its tributaries and out into the Black Sea, carrying all before it, threatening many settlements, parts of Kherson and tens of thousands of acres of prime and productive farmland on both banks, whether in Ukrainian hands or occupied by Russian forces. While the Dam has been known for months to be mined by the Russians, the water level behind the dam on Monday seems to have been 5 feet higher than a Swedish expert had modelled in October, then showing a possible water flow after a breach 6 times that of the Niagara Falls.
Water rose by 36 feet in the town of Nova Kakhovka. Many will have died and many thousands displaced with homes lost and wrecked as the water swept downstream - and now there are accounts of Ukrainian rescuers being shelled. The infrastructure of settled life will have gone – roads, bridges, mains water to a large area, electricity supplies and sewage plants. The Dam’s hydro-electric plant is destroyed with its 1.4 Terawatt hours a year capacity, serving three million people, and the contribution of its profits to the economy; factories have lost the water supplies essential to production.
As anyone who has dealt with serious flooding will know, this is not just water washing in and out, destructive as that force can be, but everything swept with it from sewage and debris to polluting oils and chemicals – and here with dislodged landmines and munitions as well – all scattered across a fertile landscape as an unfolding environmental disaster.
With Kherson’s symbol a water melon, serious vegetable farming land will have lost all its fixed equipment, irrigation and infrastructure and been polluted. A much wider area has lost water for irrigation and so production. Waterlogged land and, as the river changes its course, its exposed sandy bed will have their own effects – at this scale, even on the local climate. Early estimates suggest it may take five years for the land to recover.
As we saw after the terrible sea flooding of East Anglia, reaching far into Cambridgeshire, Holland and elsewhere in 1953 with its deaths and destruction, recovery can come, new investment can be made, irrigation returned to dry land and production and productivity restored. But that recovery and new prosperity requires peace to be achieved.