The crest gates of Srisailam reservoir, the joint project of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, were lifted again on Monday afternoon after a gap of about three weeks to let huge flood into the river course as the dam was getting inflows of over 3.93 lakh cusecs.
According to the flood monitoring officials, the dam authorities lifted four crest gates initially to about 10 feet height each at around 2.45 p.m. to discharge over 1.11 lakh cusecs of flood from the spillway as the water storage reached 213 tmcft against the dam’s capacity of 215.81 tmcft. The authorities decided to discharge flood through the spillway, in addition to release of about 72,000 cusecs flood through the two power houses, as the water level was also approaching the full level of 885 feet.
The authorities lifted two more gates, also for 10 ft height each around 7 p.m., to increase the flood discharge from the spillway to over 1.67 lakh cusecs. Srisailam was getting nearly 2.98 lakh cusecs of flood from Jurala and another 95,000 cusecs from Tungabhadra on Monday night with the possibility of further increase in the inflows. A forecast bulletin issued by the Central Water Commission (CWC) stated that there was very heavy rainfall recorded during the 24-hour period till Monday morning in the catchment areas of Krishna and its tributaries in the Western Ghats of Maharashtra. The CWC has also indicated that there was forecast of very heavy rainfall till Tuesday morning and of heavy rainfall for one more day.
River Krishna at Arjunwad in Satara district and Kurundwad in Kolhapur district of Maharashtra was rising and flowing above the normal flood situation level with the trend of further rise in the flood. Accordingly, outflow of flood from Almatti was about 2 lakh cusecs and from Narayanpur it was about 2.28 lakh cusecs at 8 p.m. on Monday. The inflows into Jurala were at 2.9 lakh cusecs at 9 p.m. on Monday.