Heavy rains during the last few days have turned the situation of insufficient water in major reservoirs in the Godavari Basin in the State to a problem of plenty with Sriramsagar and Singur getting heavy flood since Friday evening forcing the irrigation engineers to let out water from the projects, for the first time in the recent years.
Sriramsagar Project (SRSP) engineers of were monitoring the flood closely following receiving an alert from officials of Vishnupuri dam in Nanded district of Maharashtra that about 4.5 lakh cusecs flood was being released from there.
Water storage in Sriramsagar reached 81 TMC ft at 8 p.m. on Saturday against the full capacity of 90.3 TMC ft. The spillway gates of Singur were opened on Friday evening itself and the flood of over 1.5 lakh cusecs was being let out from the reservoir around the same time with over 1.16 lakh cusecs inflows. According to the officials, storage in the dam was being maintained around 26 TMC ft against its full capacity of 29.9 TMC ft.
Irrigation Department officials are expecting that Nizamsagar project would be filled and its spillway gates would be opened by Sunday evening since heavy flood was reaching it from Singur and other rivulets joining the Manjeera river course downstream of Singur. The project has gone bone dry last summer as there were “zero” inflows into it during the last water year. Other major irrigation projects such as Lower Manair Dam was also getting good flood with its storage reaching about 10 TMC ft against the full capacity of 24 TMC ft.
