Around 600 houses flooded as dam breach sinks Ukrainian town

Russian emergency services said on Tuesday that around 600 houses had been flooded after the Russian-controlled Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine was breached overnight, the Russian state news agency TASS reported.

The Russian-controlled Ukrainian town of Nova Kakhovka was under water after the nearby dam was breached overnight, while residents of around 300 houses evacuated, earlier in the day.

Parts of the town were also disconnected from power supplies for safety reasons, while a state of emergency was also declared.

The town is situated near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which has been largely unaffected by the floods.

Energoatom chief Petro Kotin said the fall in the levels of the Kakhovka reservoir would not affect the level of water in cooling ponds at the facility’s spent nuclear fuel storage pools.

An AFP report, quoting a military official said that about 16,000 people were in the critical zone on the right bank of the Kherson region.

According to Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson miliary administration, there was flooding in eight areas along the Dnipro River.

(With AFP inputs)