The Meteorological Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, attached to the Indian Meteorological Department, has contested the claim of the Kerala Dam Safety Authority and Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) that cloudburst was the immediate cause of the recent deluge in the Pampa river basin.
K. Santhosh, Director of the Met Centre, told The Hindu that Kerala had not witnessed any cloudburst in the recent past. He said the Met Centre and the IMD had been issuing periodic extended rain forecasts to the State authorities and there were strong monsoon forecasts during June-August.
He said cloudburst was a sudden copious rainfall limited to a small geographical area. It was usually associated with thunderstorms and mostly occurred in mountainous regions. He said rainfall in the forest areas of Pathanamthitta was part of the strong monsoon predicted by the Met Department and it could not be treated as cloudburst.
K.A. Varghese, environmentalist, said the 18-cm rainfall in one hour in Pune in 2010 or the 25-cm rainfall in one hour in Leh in 2010 were instances of cloudburst. He said there was every reason to treat the recent deluge in Kerala a man-made one. He accused the KSEB and KDSA of trying to cover up their lapses in dam water management and controlling the flood situation. The Central Water Commission, Indian Meteorological Department, State weather bureau, and so on had forecast heavy rain across the State. In this background, the reservoirs should have started depleting right from April-May by operating all the generators at all the power stations, especially Idukki, Sabarigiri and Idamalayar, he said.
He said the authorities should have utilised the water in the reservoirs much early in view of the heavy rainfall forecast from April. The power generated could have been sold. The reservoirs could have been lowered sufficiently to accommodate the heavy inflow.
The spillway discharges could have been minimised considerably from all the major hydel reservoirs. Why was this not done? Were a few generators at Idukki and Sabarigiri out of order? The authorities should clear these doubts of the people, he said.