Early flood allows spillway discharge of flood at Jurala in May itself

Early arrival of monsoon leads to rare flood discharge from Jurala Project, impacting Krishna Basin catchment areas significantly.

The early arrival of south-west monsoon rains in some of the catchment areas of the Krishna Basin, particularly those in the immediate upstream areas of the Jurala Project has made a rare event possible on Thursday – discharge of flood from the spillway of the project in May itself, which otherwise would begin towards June-end sometimes and mostly in July.

According to the flood monitoring officials/engineers at Jurala, the project was getting about 50,000 cusecs flood on Thursday night and it is forecast to go up to one-lakh cusecs. To maintain proper flood cushion in the reservoir, the engineers have taken up spillway discharge of flood at 82,000 cusecs.

By 9 p.m., the inflow into Jurala increased to 99,000 cusecs, and its storage reached 8.57 tmc ft against the full reservoir level of 9.6 tmc ft. The spillway discharge was increased to 83,600 cusecs. The upstream projects in Karnataka such as Narayanpur, Tungabhadra and Almatti too were getting good inflows — 1,000 cusecs, 7,800 cusecs and 60,400 cusecs, respectively. Downstream of Jurala, Srisailam project was getting 22,500 cusecs of flood, mostly released at Sunkesula Barrage across Tungabhadra river and the rivulets joining it later.

Inflow to Srisailam is like to increase with the water being released from Jurala, which is yet to reach it. By the same time (May 29) last year, Jurala had a storage of less than 4 tmc ft. Similarly, the storage of Narayanpur was 15.76 tmc ft (19.82 tmc ft this year), in Tungabhadra it was 3.34 tmc ft (12.33 tmc ft) and in Almatti it was 21.63 tmc ft (45.96 tmc ft this year).

The storage of Srisailam was 39.37 tmc ft at 9 p.m. on Thursday against its full reservoir capacity of 215.81 tmc ft. Last year it was 32.15 tmc ft.