VIJAYAWADA/GUNTUR: Water Resources department officials completed the installation of Stop-Lock gate at 16th sluice of Pulichintala Project by Saturday midnight.
Only 8.23 TMC of water was in the reservoir by 12 noon on Sunday. All the 23 gates of the projects have been closed. Officials are expecting more inflows from Nagarjuna Sagar project in the coming days. As the inflows are increasing to Srisailam from Tungabhadra dam, Pulichintala project is expected to get more inflows in the coming days.
Around two dozen experts from Polavaram and Visakhapatnam were involved in the installation of the stop-lock gate. The preparatory works for installing the stop-lock arrangements was made on Friday and installation works commenced at the break of dawn on Saturday.
Total 11 iron plates or blocks, each weighing around 30 tonnes, were inserted into the groves in the sluice walls. Using a heavy-duty crane, these plates were inserted in predetermined order. Each plate is interlocked with another, finally making it one giant block of iron stopping the flood.
From 44 TMC, the water storage level was decreased to 5.4 TMC by Saturday morning, when the all gates were closed.
Mild tremors in Pulichintala
Mild tremors were felt in Pulichintala region of Guntur district on Sunday early hours. Three tremors of 2.3, 2.7 and 3.0 magnitude on the Richter scale occurred for about a couple of seconds between 7:53:11 am to 8:16:26 am. However, their impact was hardly felt in the villages near Pulichintala project and NGRI experts as well as project engineers ruled out any adverse impact on the project.
According to National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) senior scientist Sri Nagesh, the mild tremors, which are referred to as micro earthquakes, were felt near Pulichintala village and some 5 km upstream of Pulichintala project. The first tremor occurred south-west of Pulichintala village, second one occurred at the southeast of the village and third one at northeast of the village.
Atchampet Tahsildar Usha Rani said that as the tremors were of very low magnitude, the people in the region didn’t experience them. The engineers of Pulichintala dam said that the project is completely safe. No loss of life or property was reported.