The dam breach at the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Station was modeled by Swedish engineers as early as October 2022.
The model have been further developed and water should start rising at Cherson city after three hours. The actual waterlevel in the dam is also higher than in the model below. Media enquires about the modelling of a dam breach at Nova Kakhovka should contact UNICEF in Ukraine who took over the initial model from Dämningsverket.
A worst case modelling for a russian demolition of the Nova Kakhovka Dnipro river dam show that the worst flooding will take place on the left (south east) side of the river bank. A 4 – 5 m wave will hit the Antonovsky bridge east of Cherson city after 19 hours, and there will be a backswell flooding up the Inhulets river, and after 4 – 5 days there would be some flooding up the river Bug to Mykolaiv. The demolition of the Nova Kakhovka dam is a war crime according to the Geneva Convention, but Russia has already systematically broken the Geneva convention during it’s illegal war in Ukraine.
By the evening of June 6, a wave measuring 4-5 meters in height will strike the Antonovskiy Bridge in Kherson. It is unknown whether the bridge will withstand it.
The wave will be higher further upstream, and both speed and height of the wave is higher closer to the dam. It will take approximately 19 hours for the wave to hit Cherson City in this model, as the water spreads out over the lowlands and does not just rush forwards. The flooding will be much worse on the left side of the river (left/right side is when you are looking in the direction of the river flow, in this case towards the Black Sea – generally in this case the left side is the south or east side of the Dnipro). Most of Cherson City will not flood, but the harbour and the docklands including the island in the south of the city will be flooded.
