As the waters go down here, the full extent of the damage is becoming clear.
Foetid pools remain infested with foul smelling sewage and fuel.
A tsunami of black filth has been dumped on street after street.
Thousands of homes have been devastated.
The herculean task of cleaning any of this up is made immeasurably more dangerous by the presence of Russian forward positions just across the river and sporadic Russian shelling that has killed two aid workers and severely injured others in just the past few days.
Ukraine-Russia war latest: Kyiv ‘gaining ground’ in counteroffensive
The economic cost to the region of Kherson after Russia blew its dam is incalculable.
Whatever world leaders pledge in London’s Ukraine recovery conference the bill has gone up by billions in this area alone.
The human cost just keeps rising too.
Mykhaylo Kubyskin, 75, has had a very hard war and it is not getting any better.
He had a stroke the day the Russians invaded Ukraine, such was the shock of the news.
He has trouble walking now.
Read more: Nova Kakhovka dam: Satellite images reveal scale of destructionDestruction of Nova Kakhovka dam could be most damaging single event of Ukraine warRussian forces moving out of Kherson following the breach of the Nova Kakhovka dam
During Russia’s occupation of Kherson, troops came to search his home on an island in the Dnipro and knocked him to the ground.
Then came the flood.
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1:31
Nova Kakhovka dam attack as it happened
It has wrecked his house and he sits homeless in a Kherson hospital, giving up hope.
“I’m 75 years old and I don’t know how to carry on living,” he told us.
Image:
Printworks security guard Volodymyr
“My house was flooded to the roof. I lost everything, everything.”
The scenes across this region are familiar but from natural disasters.
Image:
Printworks employees trying to clean
This was manmade. A dystopian altered landscape created deliberately by Russia.
Big ships sit stranded perched on dry land or half mounted on to docks; smaller boats are stranded in trees, building after building is ruined, rooftops sheered off or their contents spilled on the streets.
Sky News joined the region’s governor Oleksandr Prokudin as he surveyed the aftermath.
The task ahead he says is immense.
“We need to clean everything and restore the hydroelectric station and give people back houses which they lost and give back their belongings,” he says.
Image:
Satellite image shows the Nova Kakhovka Dam and hydroelectric plant after its collapse
Some aid is getting in but also getting bogged down, trucks stuck in the mud.
Most people seemed to be fending for themselves.
Image:
Vladislav outside the remains of his home
Retired photographer Vlad showed us what’s left of his riverside house.
He’s spent the past five years doing it up. All that work undone in the flood.
But somehow he still found a smile as he plucked bottles from the mud.
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“Vodka! Cognac!” he grinned.
The vodka was a gift on his birthday which fell the day before Russia invaded.
He says he won’t drink it till there is victory, however long that takes.
