Srisailam tragedy a blow to Telangana
A massive blaze that killed nine engineers at an underground 900 MW hydroelectric power station on the left bank of the Krishna river at Srisailam on August 20 was a body blow not only to the power utility but also to the Telangana government. The killer fire also left four of the six units of the power plant heavily damaged, two of them beyond repair.
Set up in 2003 with state-of-the-art Japanese technology, the plant had been working smoothly till the ill-fated night, when the fire broke out in the control panels at the fourth level of the underground station. Of the 17 employees in the station then, only eight managed to survive. The rest tried their best to douse the flames and exit but were asphyxiated.
Accidents in hydel power stations are infrequent. While the entire hydel station on the right bank of the Krishna at Srisailam was submerged under flood waters in 1998, instances of fire destroying a hydel station are rare. The August 20 accident occurred when the station was generating 21.6 million units of power per day at peak capacity following heavy inflows into the Srisailam dam.
The current loss of generation of close to 900 MW—at almost negligible price compared to the cost of power produced by thermal and other means—is a huge shock to Telangana’s already stressed economy in the ongoing agriculture season when the demand for power is slowly picking up. By the time the crippled units are ready to resume generation a few weeks or months from now, whether or not there would be adequate water in the Srisailam dam to turn the turbines cannot be predicted.
Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao immediately ordered a CID enquiry, but the probe team is yet to arrive at any conclusion. Another high-power committee from the Telangana State Power Generation Corporation is doing its own investigation. Sooner or later, we will get to know whether the disaster was due to human error or systemic failure. Initial reports suggest there was no foolproof safety mechanism, including stationing rescue teams at the site, given the massive scale of the plant. Let’s wait for the probe outcome.