Under fire and armed with shovels, Ukrainians fight to reclaim flooded city of Kherson

The day the water started rising in war-scarred Kherson, Lora Mysiyan, one of the southern Ukrainian city's hydrologists, knew she had the wrong outfit on. She was wearing a dress.

That didn't stop her from wading into the cold, murky waters of the Dnipro River as it burst its banks and began swallowing whole neighbourhoods. Roughly 20 per cent of the municipality was still underwater on Thursday, according to the United Nations.

The first few hours of the disaster — triggered by the destruction of the Soviet-era Kakhovka dam on June 6 — remain etched in Mysiyan's mind.

She said she couldn't believe it when she was told by her boss that the dam upstream from Kherson — a city with a pre-war population of 289,000 — had been destroyed.

Mysiyan, 56, told CBC News she grabbed her tools and went down to the riverbank to begin measuring. At that point, there was already water in the nearby square.

Civilians were gathering. She said she knew it was bad but couldn't show fear.

"We did not know what the level would be. We were running from point to point," she told CBC News Thursday through a translator. At one point, she said, she had to "take up" the hem of her dress as she pushed through the floodwaters.

"I was not wearing trousers that time. And I was thinking all the time [about] how will I look. No matter [how] this is happening … everyone can see that I am not panicking."

Mysiyan said the water rose so swiftly, her normal system of measurement became useless. She took to marking the height of the water on buildings with a red waterproof marker.

"I had to devise my own system," she said.

Over the next several days, Mysiyan charted the flood and kept authorities informed as water rushed up the shell-cratered streets. She often did so in the face of artillery fire from the opposite side of the river, where Russian forces have been dug in since last fall after being driven out of the portion of the city on the left bank of the Dnipro.

As the water level began to drop, she rescued a black dog from the soupy mud that now coats the streets. He follows her everywhere now.

Mysiyan and another colleague continue to chart the receding waters. She's trailed by an army of municipal workers — clad in body armour that is often draped in orange construction vets — who shovel away the muck, hose down the streets and slowly reclaim the city block by block.

The battle to clean up Kherson is happening under constant shell fire.