Surging flood flows fill Nagarjuna Sagar; Flood gates to be lifted on Monday

The stage has been set for opening the project gates on Monday to discharge the flood flows benefiting the Pulichintala project where the water level was critically low

Hyderabad: Adding to the water storage in the Nagarjuna Sagar Project by about 30 to 32 TMCs a day for the last one week, the surging flood flow in Krishna will be filling the project to its brim in the next 24 hours.

The stage has been set for opening the project gates on Monday to discharge the flood flows benefiting the Pulichintala project where the water level was critically low.

---

The project authorities have opened up the head regulators of Nagarjuna Sagar Project releasing water to its Left Canal and Right Canal giving irrigation support to its ayacut in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh respectively.

The drinking water sources in Nalgonda, Suryapet and Khammam districts were being filled on priority with the water released to the NSP Left canal on Friday.

A flurry of activity has been witnessed in the parched landscape of the left canal ayacut, which is spread over 6.5 lakh acres in Telangana and Nuzvid area in Krishna district of AP. Farmers in zone -1 and zone II under the left canal system, which account for 2.5 lakh acres and 2 lakh acres respectively, erupted in celebrations following the release of water after a long gap.

A majority of them were ready with seed beds to take up paddy transplantation.

Farmers had to forego both Kharif and Rabi in the Left canal command area last year because of the crop holiday declared by the government in view of the deficient rainfall and poor inflows into the Nagarjuna Sagar dam.

The inflows received by both Nagarjuna Sagar and Srisailam project were the lowest for the last 40 years. The Nagarjuna Sagar project storage has already touched 280 TMC.

The flood flows added to the live storage of the project by 32 TMC on Sunday alone. It is expected to touch the FRL of 590 feet (gross storage capacity 312 TMC) by Monday evening.

The flood gates of the project will be opened to facilitate discharges, said officials.

Flood in Krishna river helped in filling four its major projects – Almatti, Narayanpur, Jurala and Srisailam to their brim.

The Srisailam project is discharging 4,63,981 cusecs while the outflow from the Jurala project was 2,79.341 cusecs.

The outflow from upstream projects of Almatti and Narayanpur dams in Karnataka are in the range of 2.5 lakh cusecs and 2.2 lakh cusecs respectively.