As the Krishna river and many of its tributaries are in spate in the upstream areas in Maharashtra and Karnataka due to continuing heavy rainfall in their catchment areas of Krishna river, Jurala, the gateway of Krishna for the two Telugu States, is expected to receive heavy flood from Friday morning.
Discharge of flood from Naryanpur dam in Karnataka was over 61,000 cusecs at 7.30 p.m. on Thursday and it is expected go up to 1.2 lakh cusecs by Friday morning based on the outflows from Almatti, further upstream of Narayanpur. In the evening, the discharge of flood at Almatti was 70,000 cusecs. The authorities of Narayanpur dam have alerted the flood monitoring officials at Jurala to alert the villages along the river course in view of the heavy discharge of flood.
According to irrigation officials, it would take about 12 hours for the flood, being released at Narayanpur, to reach Jurala considering the continuing inflows in the river course in the range of 10,000 cusecs to 15,000 cusecs. With early flood to Krishna, discharge of flood water from Jurala to Srisailam either with power generation or from the spillway is continuing from July 14. There has been no spillway discharge from Jurala from the early hours of July 26.
The Central Water Commission (CWC) has forecast heavy inflows in Koyna, Warna, Doodhganga and Veer Dams based on the tributaries of Krishna and discharge of flood from them them would supplement the flood in Krishna up to Almatti dam. The inflows into Almatti which were recorded at 57,500 cusecs at 8 am on Thursday reached 1.1 lakh by 6 pm and they are expected to increase further to 1.35 lakh cusecs or more by Friday morning.
“Increase in inflows into Hidkal dam across Ghataprabha river, another tributary of Krishna, and along with the supplementation of flood from Doodhganga and Panchganga the inflows into Almatti are expected to go beyond 1.35 lakh cusecs by Friday morning “, flood monitoring officials told The Hindu stating that, in turn, the inflows into Jurala too would go up and later to Srisaialm. Although the inflows into Tungabhadra dam at Hospet in Karnataka also crossed 67,000 cusecs at noon on Thursday, it still has a cushion of over 57 tmc ft water as the storage in the dam was about 42.5 tmc ft at 6 pm against its capacity of 100.86 tmc ft.