As the water rose from the destroyed dam, the Ukrainians face a fresh new horror
The early morning explosion that woke Oksana Alfiorova from her sleep seemed normal enough, at least for wartime in Kherson.
Ms. Alfiorova, who is 57, has lived through nine months of Russian occupation – “really scary” – and almost as long since then under constant shelling from the Russian forces who set up camp across the Dnipro River after they had fled from the country had been driven out. the city.
But even for Kherson, she soon realized Tuesday morning, everything was far from normal.
Water filled the streets of her low-lying neighborhood – and rose quickly. A dam was destroyed and soon the power went out, the gas stopped and the water supply to her apartment stopped.
So Mrs. Alfiorova did something she had resisted for a long time despite all the hardships of the past year and a half: she fled. She boarded an evacuation train from Kherson to Mykolaiv, about 40 miles west, and got off at platform 1, homeless for the first time in her life.
“I had no choice,” she said.
However, many of her neighbors and friends decided to take a chance and stay, and the train intended to get people to safety had only 43 passengers, several of them children. Most of the 10 cars were empty.
Ms. Alfiorova said many people she knew had decided to move to higher ground to stay with friends and relatives or to brave the flooding in apartments on higher floors.
“I have a neighbor on the third floor and she has three dogs,” she said. “She doesn’t leave her house.
She herself lives on the fourth floor of the nine-story building and the flood was too hard for her, although it is the last grief for a city that had a population of 290,000 before Russia invaded last year.
Ms. Alfiorova, a sociologist, recalled the grim months of the Russian occupation when she had little money or food. Soldiers threatened civilians, sought out people with pro-Ukrainian sympathies, looted homes and businesses, and failed to provide even the most basic services to people.
The threat did not completely abate after Ukrainian forces recaptured Kherson in November and the Russians began shelling the city from afar. Mrs. Alfiorova got so used to it that she learned to measure the danger by the sounds in the air.
“If I hear a whistle, it could be quite far,” she said. “If it’s whistling, I know it’s not for my soul. But when it’s a rumbling sound, you realize it’s going to land very close.”
In March, she said, a shell exploded so close that for a moment she thought it might be the end. But she survived.
On Tuesday, when the explosions boomed again around 4 a.m., she thought it was just the usual Kherson wake-up call. It was not. “The neighbors were screaming,” she said.
As the streets subsided under a rushing water, police cars began patrolling with loudspeakers warning of the growing danger. Evacuate, local residents were requested.
“I checked the Telegram channels, talked to neighbors and friends and decided to go,” said Ms. Alfiorova. She and her son, Oleh, 23, hurried to collect important documents, a few cherished possessions and her two cats, Biusia and Miusia, which she packed into cardboard pet bags.
But when they tried to get out of their way, the shelling resumed, forcing them to take cover in a cellar. Only when things calmed down could they go to the train station.
“When we left, we realized that we had forgotten all our money,” said Ms. Alfiorova. But there were teams of volunteers from a variety of aid organizations at the train station to help her.
She has reached out to friends who stayed behind and believes she made the only decision she could, no matter how hard. “The water level is now high enough for people to swim,” she said.
Similar scenes were described in Antonivka, about 40 miles downstream from the destroyed dam.
A resident of the town, Hanna Zarudnia, 69, said she spent the night in a basement bunker due to heavy shelling. “About 10 houses are damaged,” she said. “Roofs have been destroyed.”
Then a new horror took shape.
“Antonivka was surrounded by water on all sides, we were on an island,” she said. “I have photos, videos: roads, a stadium, a school were flooded, everything was flooded.”
Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of blowing up the dam, a critical structure whose rupture has put thousands of people downstream at risk.
Ms Zarudnia scoffed at the idea of Ukraine blowing its own dam and recalled similar claims had been made about attacks in Kherson, where she once lived under occupation. “I witnessed that,” she said.
She has no doubt who bombed her house week after week, she said, and not who blew up the dam now.