KHERSON, Ukraine — Oleksiy Kolesnik went ashore and shivered on dry land for the first time in hours, rescued after spending the morning sitting on top of a closet in his flooded living room.
“The water came very quickly,” said Mr. Kolesnik, who was so weak that two rescue workers had to help them out of a rubber boat. “It happened so fast.”
Foul coffee-colored floods, with plastic bags and bits of straw swirling in the eddies, tied up a street in Kherson, the regional capital, where rescuers staged a full evacuation of a neighborhood cut off from the rest of the city by floods streets
Pet dogs barked. People spilled out, exhausted, carrying at most a bag or a backpack and sometimes a cat or a dog. The scene, overlooking a flooded square, was just a small snapshot of the major disruption created by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River on Tuesday.
Kherson, a center of Ukraine’s agricultural industry in the south, sprawls on the cliffs of the western bank of the Dnipro River. Many neighborhoods were not affected by the flood. But low-lying areas Wednesday were a landscape of water and floating debris. In one place, a refrigerator moved into the water.
Across the city and in southern Ukraine, officials scrambled to resolve a series of major flood and drainage issues from the Kakhovka Reservoir used for drinking water and irrigation, all along ‘a war front.
On a late spring day, the rescue operation in Kherson unfolded without panic, but with an air of resignation to the huge task of removing hundreds of people from their homes and finding them shelter elsewhere.
Rescuers ventured out in boats to pull stranded and frightened people from rooftops or upper floors of houses. From time to time there was a boom from the artillery.
The authorities were evacuating all residents of a neighborhood, called Ostriv, or island, which had also been one of the most dangerous areas for bombing in the city.
In one place, a red armchair floated in the flood. Elsewhere, garbage has been soaked in dirty water.
“We were getting used to the bombing, but I’ve never seen a situation like this,” said Larisa Kharchenko, a retired nurse who thought she might leave the flood yesterday, when the water was knee-deep in her yard, but still did not enter his house On Wednesday, it was pouring out his door.
“Somebody needs to arrest Putin,” he said, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
In some areas of the neighborhood of Ostriv, the water reached the roofs of the 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. He said he was trying to stay out of the water.
“Think about what’s in that flood,” he said. “Pigicides, chemicals, oil, dead animals and fish, and they took the cemeteries too.” He said he had been boiling tap water before drinking it Wednesday, in case the city’s water works had been infused with flood water.
Serhiy Litovsky, 60, an electrician, said he was most concerned about the long-running fight for southern Ukraine, one of the richest agricultural areas in the world but dependent on irrigation, most of the reservoir that it drains quickly.
“Without irrigation, it will be a desert here,” he said. “Without water, no one will live here. The legacy of this will last for decades.”
The scale of the disruption was hard to fathom, he said. “Without the war, this would be a huge catastrophe. But that came with the war.”
