How Russia Destroyed the Kakhovka Dam
Structural Collapse Brought Down the Dam
The Karakova Dam was breached on June 5th 2023 at around 2:50 in the morning local time. This was not due to an explosion or controlled demolition, it was a structural collapse due to ignorance, mismanagement, faulty procedures or fear.
This is the companion article to the video below:
This doesn’t mean Russia is off the hook for this. Former General Colin Powell once stated “you break, it you own it” when it came to a potential war in Iraq. This case is no different.
Russia was in charge of the dam. Its powerhouse and sluice gate gantries were all on the Russian side. When you are occupying a territory, if incompetence or neglect causes a natural disaster, it’s no different than if you planted a bomb.
I’m going to talk about how this happened, but first I need to explain how dams work.
NOTE: Paid subscribers can download the raw data and satellite imagery.
Download the raw data and satellite imagery here : Zip File, 610 MB
How Dams Work
Dams are wonders of civilization. They can reroute water for irrigation, drinking, control flooding, and provide power.
It seems like once humans started building vertically for shelter, we started building horizontally to move water around.
In fact the oldest known dam.
Is older than the oldest known bridge.
By roughly 1500-1700 years.
There are many different kinds of dams, but there are two basic types: earthfill dams, which use rock, clay or stone.
And gravity dams which mainly use concrete.
The Kakhovka Dam
The Kakhovka Dam is a combination of earthen dam and concrete dam.
Work started on the Kakhovka Dam in 1950.
And was completed in 1956 with the intention of creating power and reducing flooding along the Dnipro River.
The dam contains 22 sluice gates which can be opened and closed…
… by gantry cranes that move along a track at the “crest” or “top” of the dam.
Think of a sluice gates as a valve which allow the dam’s spillway to do its job.
The spillway is a safety feature that allows water to escape from the reservoir if the water level of the dam gets too high.
This here is the power house. It has six generators based on the discharge downstream outlets.
Hydroelectric Power in a Nutshell
Hydroelectric power is pretty simple to understand. Water flows from the reservoir into the penstock. This energy is captured by a turbine, which turns a generator. This generator sends power over the grid and the water is discharged back into the river.
The Kakhovka Dam has a powerhouse that is part of the dam - and that is one of the reasons why some of the theories on blowing up the dam are so misleading, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
There are a couple of ways that a dam can fail.
Piping
The first is piping or internal erosion - water seeps into the dam itself. All dams leak, but this is the sort of thing that would cause structural failure over the long term - as in decades. I don’t think the dam collapse was a piping issue.
Liquefaction
Liquefaction happens during earthquakes and the ground essentially becomes a liquid. Dams can be damaged in earthquakes, but that part of Europe isn’t particularly geologically active.
Liquefaction can also happen when water seeps under the dam. This can collapse the structure as seen below.
Slope, Spillway and Hydro-electric failures
Slope failures happen when the “driving force” which is usually gravity, overcomes the strength of the structure.
Spillway failures happen when the spillway is insufficient to carry away excess water, or they aren’t maintained properly.
Turbine or hydro-electric failures happen when a turbine vibrates itself apart.
Overtopping
Overtopping happens when the water travels “over top” of the dam. This is usually catastrophic on an earthen dam since the erosion just gets worse as the water continues to flow.
But when it comes to Gravity dams, their mass and perhaps their bedrock anchors are the only thing holding them in pace. Everything is fine as long as the mass of the dam is greater than the force of the water in the reservoir.
If the water in the reservoir increases, the amount of force on the dam increases as well
Spillways release this pressure.
But in a gravity dam, once the driving force of the water overcomes the force of gravity.
The dam won’t just overtop, it could overturn from the driving force of the water.
The Chain of Events
This was the Kakhovja Dam on November 10th, 2022.
Note the positions of the Gantry cranes for lifting the sluice gates
One of the sluice gates is open and ejecting turbulent water. Typically, just one spillway isn’t opened unless there is sediment buildup in a specific place upstream that the dam operators are trying to discharge.
In fact, built up sediment is such heartburn for dam operators that these structures called “groynes” are built to prevent sediment from piling up near the dam.
Russian soldiers drop three sections of bridge decking on the Ukrainian side on November 22nd. This is still visible when the picture below was taken on March 3rd.
By March 3rd, the gantry cranes have moved and the southernmost sluice gates are opened and ejecting turbulent water.
A brown spot is also developing on the roadway that was not there in November.
The water in the Dnieper Reservoir tends to hover around 16 meters in height. In got down to 14 meters in February and then it started climbing again.
Some people have speculated that Russia intentionally lowered the reservoir in order do plant explosives on the dam. I believe that this is unlikely. As you can see from the graph above, the water level of the dam tends to go down in winter - this is done intentionally. You want less water in the reservoir to make room for the spring snowmelt.
But Russia wouldn’t need to lower the reservoir if they wanted to plant explosives - they already have the perfect place for explosives - the power house. This is the weakest point in the dam and water is already running through the facility here. There would be no need to lower reservoir. Detonate the explosives and water does the rest.
If we fast forward to June 1st, turbulent water is still flowing out of the the Russian side of the spillway.
The road bridge collapses on June 2nd.
The rest of the dam collapses by June 6th.
The Mechanism of Collapse
So here is what I believe happened. Fast running water can create “scours” or “scour holes.” in the riverbed. These holes can undermine the foundation of the dam.
Notice the turbulent water along the crest on June 2nd. The dam is now overtopped by water. This should never, ever happen.
So now we have a dam that is being overtopped in one direction and undermined by a scour in the other.
And the dam gives way.
The dam doesn’t give way at the power house where it would if there had been an explosion. Instead it gives way where the spillways meet the power house and the scour was forming.
Why would Russia only run the southernmost spillways and risk scour?
Only 800 meters separates the Ukrainian and Russian sides of the dam. This is an easy shot for a sniper. Personnel may have been reluctant to move the gantry cranes closer to the Ukrainian side.
It has also been suggested that an explosion would show up on seismic sensors. The sensor data below was supposedly from a Norwegian seismic station that shows a spike around the time of the collapse. However it is impossible to determine if this true is because there’s no amplitude scale and there is no access to the raw data of both vertical and horizontal waves. This may also be just the waves of the dam collapsing.
Based on the satellite footage, I believe that this failure occurred over the course of days and the dam operators had no idea how to stop it.
How does this effect the war?
It won’t effect the war much. It isn’t a useful way to stop a Ukrainian amphibious invasion of Crimea because that would have been difficult to do in the first place. This operation destroyed Russian trenches downstream, which would degrade their defenses.
It’s possible that this may have been done to create a humanitarian crisis and blunt the Ukrainian counterattack in the Zaporizhia region, but doing so also creates a humanitarian crisis for Russia. Since most of the drinking water for Crimea comes from a canal that connect east of the reservoir.
There is precedent for using a humanitarian crisis during wartime as a strategy. In 1991 during the first Gulf war, Saddam Hussain caused an oil spill in a sort of environmental terrorism attempt that was designed to distract the coalition and prevent Marines from landing in Kuwait.
So based on the evidence, I believe that the Kakhovka Dam collapsed slowly over time due to scour and overtopping. This may have been caused by negligence, incompetence, or ignorance of plant procedures.
But either way, Russia owns this.
I would like to thank the following people for contributing to this article:
Civil Engineer Ján Krajčovič.
Civil Engineer MSc. Thomas Buchsbaum
Geotechnical Engineer Alexander Mckenney, B.Eng., M.A.Sc., P.Eng (N.S.)
Andrew Mattox
Matt Taylor, Chartered Civil Engineer from Melbourne.
Professor Eric Dunham of Stanford University
Thank you to everyone who contributed by joining my substack. The satellite footage cost me about $1,500 and I could not have done this without you.
Thank you for putting together this analysis. Well written 👍
Once I determine I can I will be upgrading my Subscription...
You take the time and do the diligence to get the facts as straight as possible... and you don't just throw shade wherever you feel like it... Thank You!