A few senior engineers of the Kaleshwaram project were away on a foreign visit when the river Godavari and its tributaries were in spate and were understood to have returned home only on Thursday, hours before the pump houses at Annaram and Medigadda were flooded.
Sources in the Irrigation Department stated that their visit abroad was initially rejected by the sanctioning authority citing the monsoon/flood season. But, they believed to have convinced the higher authorities and went ahead with their visit. They returned as the flood situation started getting grim from the irrigation facilities point of view.
A senior engineer, who was on the visit, said they had been in constant touch with field engineers of the project as well as higher authorities and were monitoring the situation and giving instructions to the concerned. In addition to their instructions, two senior Engineers-in-Chief (ENCs) from Hyderabad kept monitoring the situation constantly and coordinated with project engineers.
“We were in touch with the field engineers and monitored the progress of flood through video calls. We did whatever we could from abroad and we would have done same thing even if we were here. The situation/flood level was beyond human control and the pump houses were constructed within the safe zone after taking into consideration the flood statistics available with the regulatory agencies”, the engineer said.
