Discharge of flood water from the spillway of Srisailam reservoir resumed after a gap of about 13 days around noon on Thursday, with the inflows from Krishna and Tungabhadra rivers registering a rise from Wednesday afternoon.
After the spillway discharge at Jurala project resumed on Wednesday afternoon, the release of flood from the spillway crest of Srisailam commenced on Thursday morning as the inflows from both Krishna and Tungabhadra kept increasing steadily. Starting with lifting of one gate for 10 feet height, three more gates were lifted for the same height till 8 p.m. to increase the spillway discharge to over 1.12 lakh cusecs at Srisailam.
At 8 p.m., the inflows into Srisailam were over 1.53 lakh cusecs including supplementation of about 30,000 cusecs from Tungabhadra (Sunkesula Barrage) and the discharge of flood was about 1.43 lakh cusecs including over 30,700 cusecs of release after power generation in the right bank power station of Andhra Pradesh and the dam authorities are maintaining the full reservoir level of 885 feet and storage of 215.81 tmcft.
In the upstream at Jurala, the spillway discharge began at 14,500 cusecs from the two crest gates around 3 p.m. on Wednesday, it increased to nearly 52,000 cusecs from eight gates on Thursday night as the inflows increased to over 94,500 cusecs. Another 34,500 cusecs was also being let into the river course at Jurala after power generation. Further upstream, inflows into Almatti were about 60,000 cusecs and they were 85,000 cusecs into Naraynapur dam. At the same time, the discharge of flood to the river course there was about 60,000 cusecs and about 87,000 cusecs, respectively.
The Central Water Commission (CWC) has forecast steady increase of inflows into most of the dams in the Krishna Basin due to the ongoing heavy rainfall in interior Karnataka — in the districts of Belagavi, Vijayapura, Bagalkote, Yadgir, Koppal, Haveri, Chitradurga and Davangere.
“Due to ongoing rainfall, river Tungabhadra and river Hagari downstream of Tungabhadra Dam is rising, giving additional inflows into river Krishna at Srisailam dam. In the Godavari Basin, the authorities of Sriramsagar have started releasing water to the flood flow canal along with other canal systems in proportion to the inflows of nearly 26,000 canals as the reservoir has only about 3 tmcft of flood cushion against its capacity of 90.3 tmcft. The water released to the flood flow canal would reach Mid-Manair which has nearly 7 tmcft of cushion against its capacity of 25.87 tmcft.