Vattem Pump House Too Goes Underwater

Hyderabad: One more facility of an irrigation and drinking water project in Telangana was flooded on Tuesday with floodwaters entering the Vattem pump house of the Palamuru Rangareddy lift irrigation scheme (PRLIS). Floods from the Nagannur and Nagarkurnool reservoirs inundated a tunnel leading to the pump house, effectively putting a halt to all work there for at least a month or so.

Irrigation department officials said the approach channel to the nearly 18 km long tunnel used by officials and workers to access the structure got flooded leading to the water entering the surge pool and the pump house. The Vattem pump house has four 145 MW motors fixed while work was on fitting a fifth pump.

In all, the pump house will have nine such motors once all work is completed with a combined capacity to lift 75 cumecs (cubic metres per second) of water.

Though the PRLIS is nowhere near ready to start functioning, it was formally inaugurated by then Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao on September 16, 2023, who switched on one pump at the Narlapur pump house in the run-up to the Assembly elections. The then BRS government had projected the ‘formal inauguration’ as a major milestone for the project.

Officials said efforts are on to pump out the flood water which would gather pace once the flood waters slow down.

“For now, all other work at the pump house has been halted. Once the water is pumped out, it would be a matter of drying the pumps after which they said the pumps would be ready for use,” the officials said, adding that they do not expect much damage to the pumps from the flooding.

Meanwhile, vice-chairman of the State Planning Board G Chinna Reddy inspected the pump house and received a briefing from senior irrigation department officials on the incident of flooding. Chinna Reddy said since the pump house was still under construction and the contracting agency was yet to hand over the project to the government, all clean up and any repairs that are required must be taken up by the agency at its cost.

Officials informed Chinna Reddy that the 14cm of rain in the district resulted in a series of tanks filling up and the overflows resulted in the flooding.