Heavy to very heavy rains in the catchment areas both in Telangana and in upstream Maharashtra have resulted in huge flood to Sriramsagar project in Nizamabad district from the early hours on Thursday allowing the authorities to start discharge of flood through the spillway.
“It’s almost two months in advance compared to the commencement of flood discharge through the spillway in 2019 and 2020, when it began on September 21 and September 14, respectively. Release of flood into the river course initially began with power generation around 12.30 p.m. and through the spillway after 1 pm”, engineers at SRSP dam site said.
According to Superintending Engineer G. Srinivas and Executive Engineer Chakrapani, inflows into the dam which were around 85,000 cusecs at 9 a.m. and to over 1.44 lakh cusecs an hour later. It went up to 2.88 lakh cusecs by 11 a.m. and to over 4.32 lakh cusecs by noon, when the storage in the reservoir reached 83.25 tmc ft against its capacity of 90.31 tmc ft.
After issuing an alert on discharge of flood through the spillway, the authorities switched on 4x9 MW power station letting 8,000 cusecs into the river course. About half-an-hour later, the spillway discharge began with 25,000 cusecs initially and gradually went up to 6 lakh cusecs through 35 crest gates by 7 pm. Based on the inflows, the spillway discharge was reduced to 4.5 lakh cusecs by 8 pm.
Except Singur and Nizamsagar, all other major reservoirs in the Godavari Basin were receiving heavy flood as of Thursday evening, allowing similar discharge. Mid Manair was getting over 89,000 cusecs, Lower Manair 1.45 lakh cusecs, Kaddam 1.42 lakh cusecs and Yellampally 2.1 lakh cusecs of flood.
The discharge at Yellamapally and three Barrages – Sundilla, Annaram and Medigadda – of Kaleshwaram project was 3.32 lakh cusecs and higher.
Meanwhile, all 28 medium irrigation projects in the Godavari Basin and 8 in Krishna Basin were either in surplus or about to reach surplus stage.
In the Krishna Basin, the inflows into Jurala were around 55,000 cusecs but was forecast to go up considerably with increase in discharge at Alamatti and Narayanpur dams in Karnataka, which was 97,000 cusecs and 1.29 lakh cusecs at 6 pm. An advisory issued by the Central Water Commission (CWC) indicated that flood to Jurala-Srisailam would go up as the catchment areas in Karnataka and Maharashtra were getting heavy to very heavy rains.
During the 24-hour period till 8.30 am on Thursday, Mahabaleshwar recorded 42.4 cm rain followed by 34.7 cm in Koyna and 18.5 cm in Warana, the major catchment areas of Krishna and some of its tributaries.