NEW DELHI— The water level in the Yamuna River in Delhi has gone up a lot. It has crossed the “danger level” for the fourth time this year, reaching 205.81 meters at the Old Railway Bridge (ORB) at 9 a.m. on Tuesday. The high water level is because the Hathnikund barrage in Haryana has been releasing a lot of water nonstop since Monday, at a rate of more than 1 lakh cusecs per hour.
The Central Water Commission (CWC) said that the water level will keep going up and should reach 206.41 meters by 9 p.m. Because the water is rising, the ORB has stopped working, and officials have started moving people out of low-lying regions along the riverbanks.
An official from the Irrigation and Flood Control (I&FC) department’s flood control center said that the maximum level this season was 205.95 meters on August 19. However, the current situation is more worrying because the water is not expected to go down but to climb even more.
At 9 a.m. on Monday, the Hathnikund barrage had its highest hourly discharge of the season, 3,29,313 cusecs. This level is similar to the highest discharge during Delhi’s worst flood ever, which happened in 2023. On July 13, the river reached an all-time high of 208.66 meters.
Bhim Singh Rawat, an associate coordinator at the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers, and People, said that as long as the discharge stays above 1 lakh cusecs per hour, the water level in Delhi would keep going up. He said that nature reserves and ghats along the floodplain are likely to be partially underwater.
The I&FC department’s statistics shows that breaking the alert level happens a lot every year. In the last 63 years, it has happened 53 times. But only 14 of those years have seen the water level rise above 206 meters, and only four years have seen it rise above 207 meters, including the floods of 2023, which were the worst in history. The water level is getting closer to past flood levels, which makes this present surge a high-risk situation for the city.