Chennai

On Thursday, the combined storage in the four reservoirs was only 239 million cubic feet (mcft) as against the capacity of 11,257 mcft – it was 164.9 mcft on the same day (May 9) in 2004. Such is the magnitude of the present crisis that the storage had gone below 1,000 mcft only once in the intervening years.

Of the four, Chembarambakkam, the biggest reservoir, has only six mcft, while it is an even more abysmal one mcft at Cholavaram, the smallest of the four. The Metro Water has stopped drawing water from these two. Poondi and Red Hills have 162 mcft and 70 mcft respectively, which enough only to meet the supply for two more weeks, sending the city water managers scrambling to find more water to meet the requirement. Due to the shortage, water utility has decided to cut down supply to 500 million litres a day (mld) from 550 mld. More on p2

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