An explosion sounded in the early morning hours of June 6. Oksana Alpiorova, 57, from the city of Kherson, the capital of southern Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast, thought it was just another Russian attack. But this morning was different. “My neighbors were screaming토토사이트.”

Five nights earlier, the Nova Kahouka dam in southern Ukraine had collapsed, unleashing a massive wave of water on the city. Alfioroa had stood by her home through the nine-month Russian occupation and the subsequent Russian shelling that followed the Ukrainian military’s recapture of the city of Kherson last November. But when the dam broke, the streets flooded, and his neighborhood flooded faster because of its lower elevation. “The water level rose to the point where people could swim,” he said. Electricity, gas, and water supplies were also cut off. His home had survived the devastation of the war for the past year and a half, but he had to leave. She boarded a train to Mikolaiu, about 60 kilometers from Kherson. “I had no choice,” he said.

The collapse of the Nova Kahouka dam on June 6 brought “new fears” to Ukrainians, according to the New York Times. In Kherson, police are going around town with loudspeakers shouting “evacuate,” but many residents are choosing to stay in the city. Residents are moving to higher ground or taking refuge in the upper floors of their apartments. A train arriving in Mykolaiv was mostly empty, with only 43 passengers, including children, on board, the newspaper said. Many of those who remain in Hersonissi are elderly, as those who are able to go to Piran have long since left the city. A similar scene is unfolding in Antioquia, about 60 kilometers from Kherson. The city has been turned into an island by water coming in from all directions. Both Ukraine and Russia claim the other is responsible for the destruction of the Nova Kahowka dam.

Larisa Mujian, a hydrologist who was on the ground in Kherson that day, told the British newspaper The Guardian that the river level was “rising by six to eight centimeters every half hour and is more than three meters higher than before the dam burst.” <Russian forces have withdrawn from Kherson, but continue to shell the city from just two and a half kilometers away, leaving the city’s low-lying areas devastated even before the flooding, the Guardian reported. Now, with the dam’s collapse, the city is flooded with a river of smelly, foul, oil-covered water. It’s a surreal scene of children playing in the water while adults stare at the devastation.

According to Ukrainian authorities, the dam break has endangered 42,000 people on both sides of the Dnieper River, and the flooding is expected to peak on July 7. Satellite imagery released by U.S. satellite company Barracks Technology on the afternoon of June 6, covering 2,500 square kilometers between the Nova Kahouka Dam and the Dniprodska Bay, southwest of the city of Kherson, shows that numerous villages have been inundated. Approximately 80 villages were threatened with flooding.