KOCHI: The Central Water Commission’s report on the recent Kerala floods states that dams in Kerala neither added to the flood nor helped its mitigation as most of them were at Full Reservoir Level (FRL) or close to it as on August 14, due to more than normal rainfall in the months of June-July 2018.The report says that, had the reservoirs been a few feet below FRL, the flooding conditions would not have changed much, as the severe storm continued for three to four days at majority of places, and in any case water release would have been necessary after 1st day of the extreme rainfall.“Our dams are meant to meet the summer needs. We cannot predict the behaviour of the monsoon and empty our reservoirs earlier than required,” said Justice C N Ramachandran, chairman, Kerala dam safety authority. He welcomed the CWC suggestion regarding urgent review of reservoir rule curves.James Wilson, special advisor to state government on inter-state water, however, disagreed with the CWC suggestion that rule curves need to be meticulously drawn, particularly for the reservoirs having the live storage capacity of more than 200 MCM, to create dynamic flood cushions. “This will work in a normal or just above normal condition. What happened in August was a once in 100 or once in 500 years occurrence,” Wilson said.Kerala has 57 large dams, four of them operated by government of Tamil Nadu. The total live storage capacity of these dams is 5.806 billion cubic meter (BCM). This is equal to 7.4% of annual average runoff of all 44 rivers in Kerala, which is about 78 BCM.“We need to do a 10-year analysis of the summer flow in these dams as well as the inflow in monsoon season. During summer, almost 6.6% of water from these reservoirs are used. The KSEB’s dams are multipurpose dams for power, irrigation and groundwater recharge . So, there is no logic in releasing storage water when there was no indication of heavy rains in August,” Wilson said.However, senior atmospheric scientist C K Rajan blamed the disaster on the failure of dam authorities to monitor flood plains of rivers. “In these many years, has it ever been checked and ensured that the river water could flow uninterrupted,” he said. There is no logic in comparing these rains with 1924 because there were not many dams then, he said.There is also a need to look at the siltation of dams while considering their storage capacity. “If you look at the monsoon behaviour since 2000 in Kerala, August has always brought rains even if it didn’t rain in June and July,” Rajan said.