The water storage in Srisailam reservoir is likely to rise sharply from Thursday afternoon as the discharge of flood from Narayanpur dam was increased to 4.65 lakh cusecs on Wednesday evening.
It crossed the 150 tmc ft mark around 3 pm on Wednesday against its capacity of 215.81 tmc ft.
According to the authorities of Irrigation Department, the storage was clocking at 154.5 tmc ft around 9 pm even as the discharge of over 73,000 cusecs of flood to the river course was continuing from the reservoir through power generation by both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
In addition, the drawal of water was also continuing to Pothireddypadu (10,000 cusecs), Kalwakurthy lift (1,600), Handri-Neeva (1,000) and KC Canal supplementation through Muchumarri lift (500).
The water storage in Nagarjunasagar was 134.23 tmc ft against its capacity of 312 tmc ft at 6 pm on Wednesday with inflows of over 70,600 cusecs from Srisaialm.
The flood monitoring officials at Jurala stated that discharge of flood from Narayanpur was at this season maximum of 3.94 lakh cusecs till 11 on Wednesday but it was kept increasing gradually to 4.65 lakh cusecs by 6 pm.
CWC forecast
“It's likely to go up further as the Central Water Commission has forecast that Almatti would get over 36.6 tmc ft volume of flood in the 24-hour period till 8 am on Thursday at the rate of nearly 4.24 lakh cusecs of inflows into it”, the officials said.
The discharge of flood from Jurala to Srisailam was clocking at around 3.42 lakh cusecs at 9 pm on Wednesday through 32 spillway gates and from power generation.
The discharge of flood from Almatti to Narayanpur would be even higher as some other streams would join the Krishna river course in between.
“The flood to Jurala, however, could be much higher by Friday morning as over 2 lakh cusecs of flood from Bhima is expected to join the inflows into it in addition to the flood from Almatti-Narayanpur”, Executive Engineer of Jurala H.T. Sridhar said when contacted.
An advisory of the CWC has indicated that Srisailam is likely to attain the full reservoir level over the next three days and the flood would build up the level of Nagarjunasagar further as very heavy to extremely heavy rains were still occurring in the catchment areas of Krishna and its tributary Bhima in Maharashtra. The flood to Tungabhadra, a joint reservoir of Karnataka and two Telugu States in Ballari district was also getting about 88,000 cusecs of flood but it still had a flood cushion of 57 tmc ft. In the Godavari basin, Jaikwadi dam across Godavari was getting nearly 98,000 cusecs of flood and its storage was 73 tmc ft against its capacity of 102.7 tmc ft. Yellampally was getting a flood of 25,400 cusecs followed by 13,600 cusecs into Sriramsagar and nearly 8,000 cusecs into Kaddam reservoir.