MEDIA STATEMENT
Contact: Gary Wockner, Save The World’s Rivers, 970-218-8310

Nova Kakhovka Dam Collapse Highlights Risk of Reliance on Dams for Water Supply and Hydropower

Ukraine: Over the last week, the global public has seen a deluge of images about the human and ecological destruction caused by the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River in Ukraine. As of this writing, there is general agreement that the dam collapsed because it was blown up by explosives during the Ukraine War.

While the dispute over who blew up the dam is ongoing, the dam’s collapse and the destruction caused by it is immediately clear via the images that have been shared across global media channels (CNN here for example).

Save The World’s Rivers statement:

• Dam failure, and the resulting catastrophes, due to natural disasters and human error was already a bad enough looming hazard in the U.S. and across the planet. In our increasingly contested world, the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River in Ukraine exemplifies how large dams and reservoirs are not, and never can be, secure ways to store water or generate electricity.

Save The World’s Rivers supports alternatives to dams for water storage, including underground aquifer storage; and supports alternatives to hydropower for generating electricity, including distributed wind and solar.

For a general discussion about dams and war, see this post by Peter Gleick, “It’s Vital To Protect Water Infrastructure During War“, in Time, 6/7/2023

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