As expected, the release of flood water from Jurala to Krishna river course downstream towards Srisailam reservoir commenced on Tuesday afternoon with the Telangana State Power Generation Corporation (TS-Genco) pressing into service three units of its 6×39 MW hydel station there.
About 21,000 cusecs of flood water was being let into the river course after power generation from three units. According to engineers, the first unit was switched on around 3.10 pm followed by the second and third units within a span of little over an hour as the inflows into the reservoir which started with about 10,000 cusecs on Monday night, gradually went up to touch 96,000 cusecs by 6 pm on Tuesday. As the reservoir started getting heavy inflows, release of water to the Left, Right and Parallel Canal systems and lifting from Bhima, Nettempadu and Koilsagar schemes was also started. About 3,900 cusecs of water was being drawn by those irrigation systems together to fill minor irrigation tanks linked to them in combined Mahabubnagar district, where it is being planned to irrigate about 8 lakh acres this season.
The Central Water Commission (CWC) has forecast that inflows into Jurala could further go up beyond 1.24 lakh cusecs by Wednesday morning as heavy rains in the catchment areas of Krishna in Maharashtra and Karnataka have increased the flood into Almatti. Over 1.18 lakh cusecs of inflows were being recorded into Almatti on Tuesday evening and nearly similar amount of flood was being discharged towards Narayanpur. The CWC has forecast that inflows into Almatti could go beyond 1.6 lakh cusecs. Inflows into Narayanpur increased to about 2.12 lakh cusecs and outflows to 1.9 lakh cusecs at 9 p.m on Tuesday.
In Godavari basin, Kaddam, Kumram Bheem, Swarna and Yellampally projects were getting heavy inflows. About 50,000 cusecs of flood was recorded into Kaddam around afternoon on Tuesday but by evening it decreased to about 30,000 cusecs with the authorities maintaining a flood cushion of about one tmc ft against its capacity of 7.6 tmc ft by discharging a portion of the flood. Storage in Kumram Bheem was over 8 tmc ft against its capacity of 10.39 tmc ft in the afternoon.
Heavy flood from Pranahitha increased the inflows into Medigadda barrage to about 95,000 cusecs on Tuesday afternoon has made the engineers to discharge about 1.5 lakh cusecs of water from the barrage by lifting 23 gates.
Steady increase in inflows into Yellampally barrage improved its storage to nearly 7 tmc ft on Tuesday evening against its capacity of 20.2 tmc ft. The inflows, along with pumping of water from Sundilla, is expected to advance the plans of Kaleshwaram project authorities to take up pumping of water from Nandi Medaram to Laxmipur pump house. Arrangements are being made to run the motors at Laxmipur pump house from Monday next to take the water to flood flow canal of Sriramsagar towards Mid Manair reservoir.
