Heavy to very heavy rains in the upper Krishna Basin in Maharashtra and Karnataka, including in the catchment areas of several tributaries of Krishna are getting huge flood continuously to Jurala and Srisailam and it is forecast to increase further over the next couple of days.
Bhima, one of the major tributaries of the river Krishna, is in spate and has already crossed the record flood level at Deongaon bridge in Kalaburagi district of Karnataka. According to Central Water Commission (CWC) officials, the flood level in Bhima was 408.35 metres, “at extreme flood level”, against the danger level of 404.5 metres.
As it is, the river is flowing over 1.01 metres level above the highest ever flood of 407.34 metres recorded there on August 13 in 2006. The CWC has forecast that the flood level is expected to reach 410 meters by noon on Sunday and it would result it further increase in inflows into Jurala project in Jogulamba-Gandwal district of Telangana.
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On Saturday night, Jurala was getting inflows of nearly 5 lakh cusecs with lion’s share of the flood contributed by Bhima although the flood from Almatti-Narayanpur was also sizeable around 1.5 lakh cusecs. The discharge of flood at Jurala was about 4.7 lakh cusecs.
In the downstream, Srisailam was getting a flood of nearly 6 lakh cusecs with supplementation from the Tungabhadra, which is also expected to rise according to an advisory of the CWC by Sunday morning. The discharge of flood as also nearly 6 lakh cusecs from 10 spillway gates lifted for 25 feet height each (over 5.67 lakh cusecs) and from the right bank hydel station of AP (22,000 cusecs).
At Nagarjunasagar, the discharge of flood was about 5.31 lakh cusecs including about 5.02 lakh cusecs from the 18 spillway gates lifted for 20 feet height each and another 29,000 cusecs from power generation. “As of Saturday morning nearly 904 tmc ft of flood has gone into the sea from Prakasam Barrage in AP and it has already crossed the last year’s quantity of 797 tmc ft for the entire flood season”, a flood monitoring official stated.
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All the projects in the Godavari Basin too are getting heavy inflows with the help of rains in Maharashtra and excess flood is being released at Singur, Nizamsagar, Sriramsagar, Mid Manair, Lower Manair, Yellampally and other projects. Over 3,503 tmc ft of flood has already gone into sea from Dowlaiswaram Barrage in AP.