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Efforts on to fix TB dam crest gate without colossal wastage of water
Water gushing through the broken crest gate of the Tungabhadra reservoir at Hosapete in Vijayanagara district on Sunday.
| Photo Credit: SRIDHAR KAVALI
Taking farmers’ concerns into account, authorities are exploring ways to fix the damaged crest gate no. 19 of the Tungabhadra reservoir, which was washed away late on Saturday after its chain link was broken, keeping the water loss to the least possible quantum.
The government is consulting a second team of experts to explore how this can be done, after the first team held that the reservoir had to be emptied by half before a new gate could be fixed.
Water discharge
As much as 35,000 cusecs of water began gushing through the damaged gate as soon as the link broke. Authorities then raised the remaining 32 gates to increase the spillway discharge to reduce the pressure on the damaged gate.
Technical experts, who rushed to the reservoir on Sunday, initially held that installing a new crest gate in place of the damaged one would be possible only after half of the water in the reservoir was drained.
Accordingly, the spillway discharge was further increased to one lakh cusecs on Sunday and 1.4 lakh cusecs by Monday morning. The increased spillway discharge triggered panic among farmers in the command area that spreads across Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana.
Two views
However on Monday, Koppal district In-charge Minister Shivaraj Tangadagi said that efforts were on to fix the problem without draining the reservoir.
“One team of technical experts thinks that the new gate could be installed only after emptying the reservoir by half. Considering the farmers’ concerns, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah directed us to explore other possibilities to fix the issue without draining the reservoir. So we have today engaged another team of experts from JSW in Toranagallu, Ballari district. The team has started work,” Mr. Tangadagi said.
He added that dam authorities and experts were in constant touch with Kannaiah Naidu, an expert in crest gate works from Hyderabad, who had already submitted the design and drawings of stoplog to the dam authorities.
Pointing to the complexities involved in plugging the damaged gate without draining the reservoir Mr. Tangadagi said that mounting heavy cranes on the dam wall to fix a temporary gate with iron plates was also a challenging task.
Manufacturing work
Meanwhile, work on manufacturing the permanent gate has already begun. As per sources in the Irrigation Central Zone (Munirabad) of Karnataka Neeravari Nigam Ltd. (KNNL), two companies – Hindustan Engineering Works and Narayana Engineering Co from Hosapete – are working on it. The latter is assigned the task to make a new gate, which will be 60 ft high and 20 ft wide, based on the design given by Mr. Naidu.
The gate will be prepared by attaching 5 huge iron planks of 12 ft width each. The permanent gate will be ready by the time the reservoir level comes down to around 1,618 ft with storage of around 55 tmcft, as against the full reservoir level of 1633 ft, with a total storage capacity of 105.788 tmcft.
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