Faulty gate opens in Krishnagiri dam

Krishnagiri: Alarm bells began ringing in five districts including Krishnagiri for people living along the course of South Pennar river due to discharge not because of surplus inflow but because of the faulty gate that opened here in KRP dam.

Krishnagiri collector C. Kathiravan and others including a team from the disaster management and rescue department have camped in KRP to assess the situation.

As the gate could not be repaired immediately, Kathiravan gave instruction to officials to give emergency alert to people in villages along the course of South Pennar in Krishnagiri, Dharmapuri, Tiruvanamalai, Villupuram and Cuddalore districts.

This incident was first noticed at around 4.15 pm by the PWD staffs monitoring the inflow into the dam on Wednesday. Alert staffs switched on the emergency siren to give warning for people to move to safer places and also not to enter into the river.

“Over 10,000 cusec is discharged into the river due to the gate number one, which is one of the eight main gates that accidently opened partially,” a PWD official, who declined to be identified, told Deccan Chronicle.

“Gate number five was opened by us following the gate number one incident, done to equalize the pressure to avoid the structure of the dam from getting breached,” he said.

The official when asked about saving the water from getting wasted because of this incident said, “First the storage level should be brought down to 32 feet in height and only then can the gate be repaired to plug the leak.”

On Wednesday, the dam level stood at 51 feet in height against its fullest storage capacity of 52 feet. The inflow was 316 cuses and the out flow was maintained at the same level.

Maintenance work for this 60-year-old dam, which came into operation on November 10, 1957, and inaugurated by the then chief minister K. Kamaraj, was done at a cost of Rs 3.5 crore a few years ago.