Morgan Shimabuku
On June 6, 2023, bombs hit and destroyed the Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine and eliminated its hydropower generation, draining the massive reservoir behind the dam and flooding four cities and several dozen villages downstream (Gleick et al. 2023). The flooding left at least 50 people dead and hundreds missing—perhaps dead (Kullab and Novikov 2023). It caused contamination from pollutants picked up from sites along the river such as wastewater treatment plants and landfills, as well as contaminants that had been locked up in waters and soils behind the dam (Vyshnevskyi et al. 2023). Losing the reservoir, which had been the largest on the Dnipro River, also cut off the cooling source for the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and the water supply for 580,00 hectares of crops—about 2,239 square miles, or an area larger than the state of Delaware (Gleick et al. 2023). It was also the drinking water source for an estimated 700,000 people (Mirovalev and Mirovalev 2023). The repercussions of this attack are likely to last from years to decades.
Attacks on water infrastructure and water supplies are not new. Records of water-related conflicts go back 4,000 years to Sumeria, where the neighboring city-states of Umma and Lagash fought over water and irrigated lands. In that instance, the attacks went back and forth for a century. (See Figure at top of page, or click here for the interactive version.)
In more recent history, water has been part of many international conflicts. In May 2023, a water-rights dispute triggered a violent clash along the Helmand River between Iran and Afghanistan (Gambrell 2023). In Israel and Palestine, even before the current war that’s left water and wastewater systems destroyed in Gaza (UN-OCHA 2023), there have been more than 100 documented violent incidents between the two sides, with attacks on water wells, water pipes, and water treatment plants and violence over water allocations and access.
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