Mitryasova, O. CHRONICLES OF THIRST: DOCUMENTING MYKOLAIV'S WATER SECURITY CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS IN A WAR-AFFECTED CITY: Monograph. Mykolaiv: PMBSNU, 2026, 124 p.

CHRONICLES OF THIRST: DOCUMENTING MYKOLAIV'S WATER SECURITY CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS IN A WAR-AFFECTED CITY 3.2. SOCIAL DIMENSION OF WATER DANGER Is it possible to measure the level of human anxiety at the moment when the usual life is destroyed to the ground? How to assess the impact of a sudden loss of access to a basic resource on residents of a city under fire? To record these changes "in hot pursuit", in 2022 — during the most difficult period of the city's adaptation to the water crisis — a large-scale questionnaire "Water danger of the city of Mykolaiv during martial law" was conducted. This study, conducted in 2022, became not just a scientific work, but a unique "cross- section" of the social state in real time, capturing the moment when the familiar world of thousands of people stopped and began to rebuild according to completely different, previously unthinkable laws. April 2022 forever divided the life of Mykolaiv into "before" and "after", when after the blowing up of the water pipeline in the taps, the sign of civilization disappeared. It was during this critical period, when the city was under constant shelling, and the logistics of water supply was just emerging, that scientists came out to people to record the depth of social trauma. The survey was conducted among residents of all four administrative districts of the city — Zavodskyi, Central, Korabelny and Ingulsky. Such geography was fundamental, since each district had its own characteristics of survival. The ship area, geographically distant, faced some challenges; Central, with its high-rise buildings and population density — with others. It was important for researchers to understand whether this "water danger" is uniform or whether it creates new centers of social injustice within the same city. The survey took place in conditions when Mykolaiv residents had just begun to build their new, extreme survival strategies. It was the time of the "first eggplants", the first wells at the entrances and the first tragic queues for water under fire. People are not yet used to the crisis, they were in a state of acute stress, and their answers in questionnaires became the sincerest evidence of how a person feels when he is deprived of the basic right to water. The questionnaire "Water danger of the city of Mykolaiv in wartime" was designed together with Oleksandra Kovalska, head of the Ecology Department of Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University, not as a dry list of technical issues, but as a tool for identifying deep destructive processes in the life of the community. The authors of the study set out to find out how the absence or critical lack of water distorts work schedules and professional activities. When a person, instead of working or resting, is forced to spend time on queues for water or count every cup of water for cooking, his social role 90