Heavy rains push up water level in dams

Heavy rains in the catchment areas of major river systems of Godavari and Krishna in the South, along with its tributaries, have filled up a number of reservoirs in recent times, particularly in Maharashtra and Karnataka.

And with fresh inflows due to release of water from dams in Karanataka, the water level at the Srisailam reservoir has shot up from 790 feet about a week ago to over 857.7 feet against the full reservoir level of 885 feet.

Copious water flow in these rivers, filling up of dams upstream in Maharashtra and Karnataka and release of water from these overflowing reservoirs to lower riparian States of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, has boosted water levels in dams downstream.

The Srisailam dam on river Krishna, which is a lifeline for both AP and Telangana, was at a hopeless situation with water levels at a low of 790 ft. However, with Almatti and Narayanpur dams releasing water downstream, and Jurala in Telangana filling up, the dam has been receiving and releasing more than 1.5-lakh cusecs of water. This has been further boosted by water flow from some of the tributaries, including Bheema, and also from Thungabadra river.

Incessant rain in some of the catchment areas of these dams has further boosted water levels. However, in the major reservoir of Nagarjunsagar dam downstream, the situation is quite alarming with water levels at 500.9 feet against the full reservoir level of 590 feet.

Most of the reservoirs in the Godavari basin have also filled up in Maharashtra, resulting in fresh inflows into dams on its course located in Telangana in Kaddem, Singur and Sriramsagar, among others.

The filling up of Almatti and Narayanpur has augured well. The Thungabdra dam has also seen huge inflow at 1,624 feet against 1,633 feet.

Due to arrangements made in the past, the minimum draw down level has been fixed at 854 feet from Srisailam for supply downstream and to other locations. Telangana has approached the Krishna Water Board to release water to Nagarjunasagar so that the water level above 510 feet would enable the dam to meet drinking water supplies for Hyderabad. Two of the major Karnataka dams on Krishna Almatti has water levels at 1,704.72 ft against 1,705 ft and Narayapur at 1,614.6 ft against 1,615 ft. With weather predictions indicating some more rains in the catchment areas, dams downstream are likely to get more inflows, according to sources in the irrigation department.

In the southern States, there are 31 reservoirs that the Central Water Commission monitors, which have a total live storage capacity of 51.59-billion cubic metres (BCM).

As on September 14, the total live storage available in these reservoirs is 21.27 BCM, which is 41 per cent of total storage capacity of these reservoirs.

The storage in the corresponding period last year was 42 per cent and average storage of last 10 years was 70 per cent of the live storage capacity of these reservoirs.

Thus, storage this year is less than the corresponding period of last year, and is also less than the average storage of the last 10 years during the corresponding period.

States having better storage than last year are Telangana, Karnataka and Kerala. However, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have lesser storage than last year.

According to the Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre, the water level in the State reservoirs has decreased by around 2 feet since last 8 days.

The levels at Harangi, Hemavati and KRS reservoirs have decreased since last eight days. The levels in these reservoirs are less when compared to the corresponding period of 15 years average levels.

And water level at Bhadra, Tungabhadra, Ghataprabha, Malaprabha have increased since last eight days.

The levels at Harangi, Hemavati, KRS reservoirs have decreased since last eight days. The levels in these reservoirs are less when compared to the corresponding period of 15 years average levels.

With inputs from Anil Urs in Bengaluru and Vinson Kurian in Thiruvananthapuram

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