India: Water release from dams didn’t lead to Kerala floods: IIT-M-Purdue University study

Source(s): Hindu Times, the - Hindu Group, the

By Jacob Koshy

The devastation wrought by the Kerala floods of August could not be attributed to the release of water from dams, says a computer-simulation of flood storage and flow patterns by a team of researchers.

Scientists from the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras and the Purdue University, United States, say that the odds of such floods were “0.06%” and no reservoir management could have considered such scenarios.

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What they found was that in the hypothetical scenario that there were no dams in the Pamba River Basin (PRB) — there are 17 dams and barrages — the “peak discharge” at locations downstream of the Idukki reservoir would have been “reduced by 31%.” This, however, wasn’t a reduction enough to have prevented the inundation, according to the researchers.

“The major share of the total flood flow was by Perinjankutty (3,500 m3/s), which is a near uncontrolled tributary, while the 14 controlled releases from Idukki had contributed only 1, 860 m3/s… the results indicated that the role of releases from the major reservoirs in the PRB to cause the flood havoc was less,” the authors say in the study to be published in a forthcoming issue of the peer-reviewed Current Science.

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