Bokaro residents, brace for dry days.
Taps will go dry in the steel city on Thursday and will supply water for only two hours every alternate day from Friday. This is because the 34km-long Tenughat canal, which supplies water from Tenughat Dam to Bokaro, has been breached thrice in the past seven days, causing the water level at Bokaro Steel-based cooling pond to go low.
Water from the canal gets collected in the cooling pond. At present, the water level in the 8sqkm pond is at 216m, which is stated to be alarming as the normal limit is 217m.
The canal had first caved in last Wednesday night when the water level in the cooling pond was reported to be at 217.185m.
After 36 hours of repair by Tenughat Dam water resources department, it once again caved in on Saturday. Again another massive renovation job spanning three days, this time by Bokaro Steel, leakage was spotted, but at a different spot, when water was released in the canal on Tuesday afternoon.
The latest leakage was repaired early on Wednesday morning, after which the dam gates were lifted 8cm to release water into the canal around 11am.
A senior technocrat of Bokaro Steel told The Telegraph over phone from the repair site that they expected to lift the gates by 12cm in the night. "If everything goes right, the gates will be lifted to their full capacity of 24cm to release water," said the senior technocrat.
Sources added that as the canal bed had gone dry, it would take another 12 hours for the water to reach the cooling pond, in case it was not breached further.
Bokaro steel plant's chief of communications Manikant Dhan said on Wednesday that water rationing would continue till further orders. "Unless water at the cooling pond reaches a satisfactory level, this provision will continue. It might take at least a week. Till then lakhs of Bokaro residents will have to put up with the difficulty," said Dhan.
This is the first time that the canal, which costs Bokaro Steel Rs 50 lakh per year for maintenance, is not receiving supply from Tenughat Dam, leading to water scarcity.
