The six-and-a-half-decade-old Kaddam Narayana Reddy project survived another scare and test of the time on Thursday, the second year in a row, as it withstood over 4 lakh cusecs flood that was reaching it for about 10 hours, in spite of its effective discharge capacity of 2.43 lakh cusecs through 14 out of 18 spillway gates.
Four other spillway gates could not be operated (lifted) by the project engineers due to a “mechanical snag”. As a result, some quantity of water passed over the closed spillway gates’ head for about six hours forcing the authorities to vacate people living in 12 villages downstream on warfooting as they had no answer to allow higher discharge of flood from the spillway to lessen threat to the dam.
Construction of the project taken up in 1949 was completed in 1958, but in August that year the dam suffered a breach as it received 5.19 lakh cusecs flood against the designed discharge of 2.5 lakh cusecs forcing the expansion of the spillway to discharge 3.82 lakh cusecs. On July 13 last year, the engineers did not operate one gate due to a mechanical snag as the flood to dam was reported at about 5 lakh cusecs. On Thursday too the flood was put at over 5 lakh cusecs, unofficially.
