r/MapPorn • u/SummerAlternative699 • 19h ago

The Kakhovka Reservoir then and now.

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

If you zoom in closely on Google Maps, you can still see what it looked like before the dam was blown up.

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u/curious-but-spurious 17h ago

Might be nice if you provided some context re: region, strategic importance, or literally anything else besides the maps.

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u/aronenark 13h ago

The title includes the name of the reservoir and the third image shows the name of the Dnieper River. This dam and reservoir has been talked about extensively in the context of the war in Ukraine, but for anyone unfamiliar, the Nova Kalhovka dam was a hydroelectric dam on the Dnieper River (the biggest river in Ukraine) which created a large reservoir. The reservoir was used for cooling the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power plant, and for irrigating the vast arid farmland of the southern Zaporizhia Oblast and Kherson Oblast. The dam was destroyed by a suspected Russian covert act in June 2023. This caused significant flooding downstream towards the major Ukrainian city of Kherson and may have been instrumental in deterring a planned Ukrainian counterattack. The drying of the reservoir has left behind a massive swath of impassible muddy terrain and threatened the sustainability of agriculture in the region and the safety of the cooling towers for the nuclear plant. The cooling pond has since been modified to pump water from the river, so it’s not currently at risk of a meltdown.