The Hindu 04.04.2013
Corporation scrapes Cauvery bed for summer water supply
drilling exercise:Mayor A. Jaya, right, inspecting the digging of
borewell on the dry Cauvery river bed at Kambarasampettai pumping
station, Tiruchi, on Wednesday. —Photo: M. Moorthy
The Cauvery river bed has turned bone dry and the water
table in the city has slumped already. With a long summer ahead, the
Tiruchirapalli City Corporation is gearing up to meet the city’s
drinking water requirements over the next three or four months by
sinking five additional deep borewells on the riverbed to maintain the
current level of supply.
The giant borewells are
being sunk around the Kambarasampettai Head Works, one of the city’s
main drinking water sources, at an expenditure of Rs. 55 lakh. The
borewells are expected to yield about 10,000 litres per minute (LPM) and
help the civic body see through the summer.
Down the
years, the corporation had sunk a series of borewells around the
collector wells of the water schemes feeding the city from the Cauvery
river.
Twenty one borewells have been sunk around the
Kambarasampettai Headworks to supplement the yield from the main
collector well. The borewells have been contributing up to 30 million
litres of water a day. But at least four of them, sunk in the late
1990s, have dried up.
The additional borewells are
being sunk now in view of the possibility of the water table going down
further at the height of the summer. The corporation is digging deeper
this time.
The five new borewells are being sunk for a
depth of 60 feet. In normal times, water will be available on the
riverbed at a depth of just 10 feet. But with the river going dry since
December, after the storage level at the Mettur reservoir depleted,
water is now available only at a depth of 20 feet.
Currently, the city gets about 90 million litres a day (MLD), mostly from the Cauvery bed.
The
Rs. 221.42-crore new drinking water augmentation scheme, with its
source at Coleroon river, is expected to become operational at least by
next month and ensure a comfortable position by providing an additional
60 MLD of water to the city.
On Thursday, Mayor A.
Jaya, accompanied by Executive Engineer R. Chandran, took stock of the
situation and inspected the work on sinking borewells at
Kambarasampettai.
Later, she said that the work was
under way on sinking 50 borewells, all fitted with hand pumps, in areas
facing short supply in the city at a cost of Rs. 40,000 each. Ten others
with power pumps were coming up.
Arrangements are on to supply water through tankers to fill an additional 50 PVC tanks.
Five
new generators are to be acquired, at an investment of Rs. 1.18 crore,
to keep the corporation’s water pumping stations and sumps running at
times of load-shedding. All these works are to be executed at a cost of
Rs. 3.59 crore, which includes a grant of Rs. 3.44 crore sanctioned by
the State government for drought relief work. All the works to augment
water supply are to be completed by this month end.
