The discharge of flood from the spillway of Jurala project which was stopped early on Wednesday due to steep fall in the inflows resumed again in the evening, after a gap of about 13 hours, following resumption of heavy flood discharge at Narayanpur dam in Karnataka.
After getting an alert from the authorities of Narayanpur dam that they would start discharging heavy flood of about 1.22 lakh cusecs in the evening by lifting 14 spillway gates, hardly one-tenth of it in the morning, flood monitoring officials at Jurala lifted five spillway gates at 6.30 pm discharging a flood of about 21,000 cusecs in addition to about 37,000 cusecs release of flood after power generation. The spillway discharge would be gradually increased proportionately to maintain safe level in the reservoir based on the inflows.
Narayanpur dam was getting about 40,000 cusecs at 6 p.m. and the discharge of flood at Almatti was 80,000 cusecs with the trend to increase. Inflows into Almatti were at over 1.34 lakh cusecs. Similarly, Tungabhadram dam was getting over 50,000 cusecs of flood in the evening and the water storage in the reservoir crossed 86.3 tmc ft against its capacity of 100.86 tmc ft.
Heavy rain forecast
Following heavy rainfall in the catchment areas of upper Krishna and some of its tributaries both in Maharashtra and Karnataka on Tuesday and forecast of heavy to very heavy rainfall in the Central Maharashtra region for the next two days and heavy rainfall in Satara and Kolhapur areas for another three days, the Central Water Commission (CWC) has indicated on Wednesday a rise in water levels in upper Krishna basin in the upstream of Almatti dam.
According to a CWC bulletin, heavy rainfall of 15 cm was recorded in Augumbe, the major catchment area of Tungabhadra river, 6.6 cm in Mahabaleshwar, the catchment of Krishna and 5.9 cm in Koyna, a tributary of Krishna, during the 24-hour period up to 8.30 am on Wednesday. Hidkal dam across Ghataprabha river, a tributary of Krishna above Almatti, was also approaching surplus stage as water level in the dam stood at 661.904 meters against full reservoir level (FRL) of 662.94 metres on Wednesday morning with inflows of over 13,000 cusecs.
In the Godavari basin, the flood at Laxmi (Medigadda) barrage across Godavari river below Kaleshwaram in Jayashankar-Bhupalapally was about 3.5 lakh cusecs, with most of it coming from Pranahitha, and in the downstream at Polavaram in Andhra Pradesh, the flood was about 3.9 lakh cusecs. The CWC has indicated further rise in the flood below Kaleshwaram with heavy to very heavy rain forecast in Telangana and AP over the next two days.
