Water stock up, 1 lake overflows

MUMBAI: Heavy rainfall this week has filled up the seven lakes supplying water to Mumbai enough to give the city another 200 days of water in stock.

MUMBAI: Heavy rainfall this week has filled up the seven lakes supplying water to Mumbai enough to give the city another 200 days of water in stock.

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Following heavy rainfall in the catchment areas, the seven lakes now hold 7.52 lakh million litres of water — nearly 51% of the city’s needs.

Tuesday’s heavy rainfall resulted in Powai’s Tulsi Lake overflowing around 6:30am. While the lake only caters to 1% of Mumbai’s water needs, it has filled up earlier than last year — in 2015, the lake started overflowing only on September 22.

Starting October 1, the city needs 14.47 lakh million litres of water to go without water cuts till July 31, 2017, officials said.

Mumbai requires close to 3,750 million litres every day. However, to tackle water shortage, the civic body reduced supply to 3,200 million litres a day from August 2015.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is now mulling over withdrawing the 20% water cuts, and is likely to come up with a final decision this week. The city’s current water stock is 4.8 lakh million litres more than what was recorded at the same time last year.

According to government data, Bhatsa, which supplies 50% of Mumbai’s water requirement, has 3.8 lakh million litres. In 2015, it only had 71,000 million litres of water.

Meanwhile, heavy rainfall on Tuesday resulted in 21 tree fall incidents in the island city and the suburbs. There were nine incidents of short circuit reported.