How a Ukrainian city supplied water during the conflict

Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, a 15 minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, educate, and inform other water sector leaders from across the globe. My name is Piers Clark and today I'm with Mr. Oleksandr Syenkevych, the City Mayor of Mykolaiv.

Oleksandr, thank you for taking the time to be with me today.

Oleksandr Syenkevych: Thank you Piers for the invitation.

Piers Clark: Now, I'd like to start by getting to know a little bit about your background. So can you tell me, uh, where you come from, what you did before you became mayor? I understand you started your own business. Is that correct?

Oleksandr Syenkevych: Yes, it is. I was born in 1982 and all my life I lived in Mykolaiv, exactly the time when I got education in university in Kyiv, in the capital of Ukraine.

By education, I'm a decision maker. So my main topic was I. T. And, uh, I was a software developer. Then I created my company in after the university and, uh, it still works. Actually it's U S Ukrainian company that with the headquarters in Princeton. Then I decided to accept. To do my life better, I decided that I can live in, in the egg of happiness and decided to go outside and create the more, uh, happiness for other people.

I created my non-government organization to decided to do some public activities, and then I decided in 2015 to go for mayor.

Piers Clark: And you became mayor of about 20 cities. Is that right? If I understood that correctly?

Oleksandr Syenkevych: Yes, right. 20 other candidates and, uh, they decided also to, to go there. But I, I won in a second tour, one of the most well known candidate from nowhere, let's say.

Piers Clark: And so you're a very experienced mayor. You've had almost 10 years of being a mayor. And so before the conflict began, you'd already got a lot of experience of leading the city, correct?

Oleksandr Syenkevych: Yes, uh, I was even impeached in my first term, and then I was, yes, for half of the year, six months, because city council was really tough.

And I was re elected in 2020. Now I have a majority in my city council and I can do much work. But unfortunately, we have a war now..

Piers Clark: Okay. Now, before we come to talk about the conflict, can you just tell me a bit about how many people live in the city of Mykolaiv?

and where is Mykolaiv for those who don't know in the description of, uh, of the whole of the Ukraine?

We've all seen lots of maps of the Ukraine. Uh, where would Mykolaiv be?

Oleksandr Syenkevych: So Mykolaiv is a half a million city on the south of Ukraine. Actually, this is the second biggest port in Ukraine. We do about 40% of all ba cargoes from, uh, Ukraine, the city of port. We are not on the seashore, but on the river that connects to the sea.

And city now doesn't operate because, of the occupied territories of the nearest region, we are unable to go out to the blacks. Uh, our city is a half a million city with this ship building heritage. All the aircraft carriers of Soviet Union were built in Mykolaiv in our city.

Piers Clark: Wow.

Oleksandr Syenkevych: Even though that ship, Moskva, that now feeds the fish in the Black Sea, also was built in the city of Mykolaiv.

So we had really big Soviet Union heritage and our people were shipbuilders. And after the Soviet Union win, we decided who we are and we decided we're a city of port. Right. In the, in time of the first days of war, uh, our city was the city that stopped the Russian invasion of the south of Ukraine.

So the nearest regional center of Kherson was occupied, then Russian troops came to the city of Mykolaiv, and we stopped them. That's why we got the title city of heroes, let's say the city hero by the city of heroes, because we stopped the invasion of the south of Ukraine.

Piers Clark: Excellent.

And, how far from the front are you?

Oleksandr Syenkevych: We were so, uh, Russian troops were on the outskirts of the city for let's say eight months. Then, they moved behind the Neal River, which actually was the main river for us, at water source. This is the bigger, biggest river. So now they are the left bank and we are on the right bank. So it's about 70 kilometers.

Piers Clark: Yeah, frightening. Okay, can we now talk about what assets did you have, what water and wastewater assets did you have before the conflict, um, happened? Just walk me through what you had.

Oleksandr Syenkevych: I can say that, uh, we had, um, So the main water source was Nipper River. Actually, two pipes in the diameter of 1. 4 meters brought us, uh, about 150, 000 cubic meters per of fresh water to the city per day.

Uh, our system, water supply system and, wastewater supply system was really old. So we decided to go together with European Investment Bank to change it. Actually, that's this project of the European Investment Bank was pilot project of Ukraine with EIB, in 2006. But then like it was stopped for 10 years because no one decided to go with it. No one could work with it. And, uh, even I have, my thought that, that, that they decided to privatize, uh, our water supply company, and they just don't want it to go with this project, just not to be involved in a business with any international financial organizations.

Piers Clark: So the project, so, so your water supply came from two pumping stations that are outside the city pumping water through and that that scheme had been started in 2006, been put on hold, but was then up and running at the start of the conflict.

Oleksandr Syenkevych: Yeah, the project, the project was, uh, stopped in 2006 and 2016, we started the project of reconstruction of our wastewater treatment plan.

And, uh, actually we stopped it in 2022 because of the war.

Piers Clark: So you had a mix of pumping stations bringing you fresh water in and a, uh, a single wastewater treatment plant serving the city? Yeah. For the whole city. For the whole city. Now tell me what happens, what's happened to those facilities during the conflict?

Oleksandr Syenkevych: Actually, uh, after the occupation of the nearest city of Kherson, Where our pumping station is situated. Russians decided to destroy these pipes. Uh, they said that we can use them to send troops there to the, to, the Harrison. But actually after the explosion, we, found that we lost, uh, The water supply and we like three or four days.

We even started to see to find where where it is. And then we found with the drones that they just destroyed put the explosive under the pipes and explosion destroyed pipes in three places.

Piers Clark: So just to be clear, so there was a particular day when you woke up and found there was no water coming into the city because the, the, the trunk mains that were delivering water, just nothing was flowing.

You did an investigation, discovered that that it had been a deliberate act to blow up in three places, the supply pipes coming into the city.

Oleksandr Syenkevych: Right, right. Uh, we found that the pressure is low. And then we called to those people who were on the pumping stations, even in occupations, they work there. And they told us everything is pumped.

I mean, the water is pumped to the city, but you just don't make it out the other end. Okay, so that's in the middle. So we stopped pumping the water and found some small lakes around this pipe. And then we found that they destroy a pipe.

Piers Clark: Okay, and the wastewater, so that's on the drinking water side. On the wastewater facility, what's happened there?

Oleksandr Syenkevych: On the wastewater facility, everything is good, because it's on the outskirts of the city, so it was somehow damaged by the rocket attacks, but it still works and everything's good with it.

Piers Clark: So now I understand what you had. I understand what's happened in there. I've now got this nightmare scenario of trying to understand what did you do?

How did you keep the population of half a million people, um, in supply of water, bearing in mind your key water source had disappeared overnight.

Oleksandr Syenkevych: So we were in a big mess. So first of all, we, let me see, started to think how we will live without water at all. But, uh, seeing, let's say, looking to the future, in future, I decided before that act of Russians to drill some boreholes around the city near the hospitals.

Actually, our region is not well, Watered and the water under the ground is really salty. So, we understood that we can't leave people without water. Actually, the act, happened in April 2022 and we knew that there is a summer in front of us and there'll be, uh, there will be a very big problem with, uh, some, you know, um, Yes, and we have probably the cholera in the Previous times of Soviet Union in 90s.

So we knew that we need to to resolve this situation as soon as possible. So we made a decision to take the water from the river, which our city stays on. But the only problem that this water is really salty because of the closeness to the Black Sea, that's why we never used it for the drinking water.

But it was like, you know, a scale between living without water and ruining our waste, uh, water pipes because they will be, you know, destroyed. They will dry, everything will be bad. And around the salty water that will destroy everything. Actually our water supply, uh, pipes and so just to be clear with the rust

Piers Clark: and just to be clear So you've got this, very salty brackish water that people can use for washing , and for non non potable sources Um, but what are they doing?

What are the population of, Mykolaiv doing for potable water?

Oleksandr Syenkevych: We, we still, we have, around 280 boreholes, actually part of them, it's like about 80 percent of them boreholes. And, uh, part of them just, uh, system also most cleaning system that we put on our, water from the pipes. We clean it to the level of drinking and people can get it for free.

So you can imagine it. Help me in city where people every day you have every day routine, but the plastic bottles they go to to these water sports, we call them and,fill the plastic bottles, five liter plastic bottles to their community. Houses, but bring them, bringing them to the fifth floor where, they don't have elevators.

So yes, this problem made us stronger. So more fit, you know. But anyway, today we are, on a project where we will bring a water from up north of this river where it's, it doesn't salty, the French company egs, together with European Investment Bank made research and we found that we are able to bring it fresh water from this river, and we will, we plan to do it in the nearest time. So we plan to start this project in a recent, in the nearest days, and it will give us water in the autumn of the next year.

Piers Clark: Brilliant. I was the former asset director of Thames Water and what you've just described, Is an absolute nightmare. I can imagine how the city suddenly deprived of its water resources.

It sounds like you'd already started drilling some boreholes around the critical community centers like hospitals to give you some resilience, but you then needed to drill many more boreholes to ensure that you had a potable water supply. But to top that up, you're taking a brackish water from the river.

But that is going to have a medium to long term impact on your infrastructure because of the quality of that water is not good enough. Can you just talk me through the timelines of making these decisions? Because normally in a water utility, it takes quite a long time to get through the asset investment decisions signed off.

You didn't have time. You, something happens. You were making decisions within hours rather than

Oleksandr Syenkevych: We had no time. We had no time because it was a war and people couldn't wait. So, uh, it was like a week to make a decision to take water from the salty water from the river. A month to build a new pipe and a pumping station to provide city with, water.

To bring this water. So we pumped it in the city, then pumped it to the water treatment plant. And then from the water treatment plant back to the city with a different pipe. So it was like altogether. It took about two months while the time I also forget to tell you to forgot to tell you about the water that we pumped to the heating system.

Because it was clean. It was also cleaned by Osmos cleaning systems because we had no chance to ruin the heating system. So it was also the problem. But we had a year, almost a year to prepare for the winter.

Piers Clark: Marvellous. Oleksandr, we're coming to the end of our time. Um, can I ask you a cheeky question?

Can I ask you, go back 20 years, and what advice would you give the young Oleksandr Syenkevych? Would you say, go for that mayoral post, or would you give some other advice to him?

Oleksandr Syenkevych: First of all, don't be afraid of anything. So anything that you can imagine can be done. And, go forward. Take a risk and you will have a result.

And, uh, all my life I was kind of afraid, do I need to do or not? But yes, today I could say to myself, go forward. and any spheres of your life, either a relationship with your wife or, uh, city management.

Piers Clark: That is spectacular advice. Thank you very much, Oleksandr. Um, we're thinking of you and we support you from in any way we can.

You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with Piers Clark. I've been talking to Oleksandr Syenkevych, the City Mayor of Mykolaiv. Please join us next time. [00:15:00] Goodbye.