‘It just keeps coming’: Rescue workers reach a flooded neighborhood to find foul-smelling water and exhausted people.

In one place a red armchair floated in the tide. Elsewhere, garbage floated in the dirty water.

“We started to get used to the shelling, but I have never seen such a situation,” said Larisa Kharchenko, a retired nurse who thought she could survive the flood yesterday, when the water was knee-deep in her garden. but not in yet. her home. On Wednesday it poured through her door.

“Someone has to arrest Putin,” she said, referring to Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin.

In some parts of the Ostriv district, the water reached the roofs of houses. “It just keeps coming,” Ms. Kharchenko said.

Alla Snegor, 55, a biology teacher, stepped out of a boat and looked back at the city’s flooded streets. She said she tried to stay out of the water.

“Think about what’s in this flood,” she said. “Pesticides, chemicals, oil, dead animals and fish, as well as cemeteries were washed away.” She said she boiled tap water before drinking it on Wednesday, in case the city’s water mains were drenched in flood water.

Serhiy Litovsky, 60, an electrician, said he was most concerned about the long battle ahead in southern Ukraine, one of the world’s richest agricultural regions but dependent on irrigation – most of it from the rapidly draining reservoir.

“Without irrigation, it becomes a desert here,” he said. “No one lives here without water. The legacy of this will last for decades.”

The magnitude of the disruption was difficult to fathom, he said. “Without war, this would be a major catastrophe. But this came along with the war.”