Oleksiy Kolesnik waded ashore and stood, trembling, on dry land for the first time in hours, rescued on Wednesday morning after spending the predawn sitting on top of a cabinet in his flooded living room.
“The water came really quickly,” said Mr. Kolesnik, who was so weak he had to be helped out of a rubber boat by two rescue workers.
“It happened so fast.”Fetid, coffee-colored floodwaters, with plastic bags and bits of straw swirling in the eddies, lapped at streets in Kherson, a regional capital in southern Ukraine, where rescuers had evacuated a neighborhood cut off by inundated streets.
Exhausted residents spilled out of the rubber boats, carrying at most a purse or a backpack, and sometimes a cat or a dog.
The scene, overlooking a flooded square, was just one small snapshot of the vast devastation caused by the destruction on Tuesday of the Kakhovka dam, swelling a more-than-50-mile stretch of the Dnipro River until it swallowed docks, farms, gas stations, cars, factories and houses.
Persons:
Oleksiy Kolesnik, ”, Kolesnik
Locations:
Kherson, Ukraine, Dnipro