SAN ANTONIO – It’s been one week since a major dam collapse in Southern Ukraine forced mass evacuations.
Thousands of people are living in what Ukrainian officials are calling the ‘danger zone’ where homes and communities are underwater.
Some are calling this tragedy “ecocide.”
“I am from Ukraine, Kherson region. Oleshky city,” Olena Romanko said.
For the last 10 months, San Antonio has been her home because her country of Ukraine and her way of life has been devastated by war.
“Her husband is in Crimea right now. He was captured at the beginning of the war by Russian troops because he tried to help Ukrainian soldiers,” Olenka Bravo, Romanko’s translator, and friend, said.
Now a dam collapse has forced the city she grew up in, Oleshky, underwater.
Romanko says her mother is still there.
“She saw that water will arrive more, more more, more, and she swim and our neighbor’s house, four floors,” Romano said.
She says her mother is safe now, but there’s no electricity, no help coming in, and bodies floating in the streets.
Bravo says the dam collapse is causing an ecological disaster.
“It’s like a bomb, but bomb that like slowly but surely became more and more and more dangerous,” Bravo said. “It’s going to be a huge, huge problem. Ecocide, genocide, starvation.”
Growing up near the dam, Romanko says the collapse and subsequent flooding was something they prepared for in school but not something she thought she’d see living a world away.
“She always knew about the danger that might come, but she never believed it would happen. It was like a like a bad dream,” Bravo said.
When Romanko came to the United States through a Ukrainian refugee program, she had hopes of going back someday, reuniting with her husband and brother, who is fighting on the front lines.
However, now she fears there will be nothing left to go back to.
“Everything is like destroyed. It would it will take years to rebuild houses, to rebuild ecosystem, to to put electricity,” Bravo said.
Romanko has a bakery in San Antonio called Pashina Pastry, it’s off of Hildebrand.
She is raising money to help her brother with supplies on the front lines.
You can order from her bakery here or stop in at 205 E Hildebrand Ave.