On July 29, more than 100 UAnimals volunteers gathered in Khortytsia to clean up the garbage that came to the surface due to the shallowing of the Dnieper.
In 5 hours of intense work, it was possible to collect about half a ton garbage: car tires, bottles, cans, fragments and parts of ships, remnants of tackle, and other fishing tools.
When the Russians blew up the dam of the Kakhovskaya HPP, the water level in the Dnieper fell, and about 200 hectares of a beach area was formed on Khortytsia, which used to be the bottom of the Dnieper at a depth of up to 4 meters. Garbage in these areas is dangerous for animals: they can injure their paws on glass and become entangled in nets.
“We often find snakes, frogs, and turtles that migrate along the shore, looking for favorable conditions for life, and die, entangled in garbage. Once, the roe deer got entangled in the nets and cut its legs, but luckily it got free and was saved,” says Mykhailo Mulenko, acting head of the nature protection sector of the Khortytsia National Reserve.
To protect the animals of the reserve, UAnimals took up the cleaning.
“At first, it was a task with an asterisk, but along the way, we met fantastic people with whom anything is possible. Not only the residents of Zaporizhzhia gathered for the cleaning, but also people from, for example, Kyiv and Dnipro. By the way, I invite everyone to join our volunteer community — search for community_uanimals_bot in Telegram. It’s never boring with us,” says UAnimals Community Manager Inga Sakada.
The Russians’ detonation of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station dam also led to the death of more than 11,000 tons of fish.
According to the Ministry of Environment, due to the blow-up of the hydroelectric power station, nature suffered losses of at least 55 billion hryvnias.
Foto: Olena Tita, Andrii Yakymenko
