[ad_1]
As the water level of the Yamuna River in Delhi continued to rise on Wednesday, the floodplains recovered, relieving some of the flood waters’ outflows.
On Wednesday, the river crossed its highest flood level to date, and levels continued to rise relentlessly, even as the peak discharge of water from the Hatnikund Valley upstream of Haryana was not the highest that has been recorded so far.
Bhim Singh Rawat, an ecologist and assistant coordinator of the South Asian Network for Dams, Rivers and People, noted that a peak discharge of over 8 lakh cusecs was recorded even in 2019 from Hathnikund, higher than the peak of 3.59 lakh cusecs recorded on Tuesday.
Then, Rawat noted, the highest flood level, in 1978, had not been breached in Delhi. This time it was breached. There could be multiple reasons. One of them could be that there had been heavy rains downstream of the Hatnikund… Another could be that there was silt built up and trapped in the stretch of the Delhi. There are many sectional and longitudinal structures along the Delhi stretch…”, Rawat said.
“A possible explanation is that the time of flood concentration is shorter, and that the same amount of rain fell in a shorter period and moved rapidly downstream,” said Manu Bhatnagar, Principal Director of Natural Heritage at INTACH.
The banks of the river have not yet been breached. “There were floods in 1964, 1958 and 1948, but we did not reach the levels attained at that time, and the 1978 flood was considered a benchmark for the highest flood. After that, we did not have many protection measures. The river stayed within its dams this time. If there are openings in the dams and water rises, it can seep.
[ad_2]
