People living on the banks of the Meenachil will no longer have to wait for official alerts to know when they need to rush out of their houses.
Thanks to the Meenachil River Protection Council (MRPC), they can now check what the river is doing in their area at any time of the day, round the year.
The river, which courses down the heart of Kottayam, will now be covered by several river levels and rainfall gauges, which collect rainfall data remotely and mitigate the risk from the increasing incidence of flash flooding.
According to Eby Immanuel, general secretary of the organisation, as many as 30 rainfall gauges in the first phase have been installed alongside a couple of water-level scales at Bharananganam and Erattupetta. The local body authorities along the course of the river too have been approached, seeking assistance in installing more scales.
“The gauges will be installed in a way to work out the river basin including its tributaries as a single unit. On completion of the project, hundreds of such gauges and water scales will come up along the course of the river from the Wagamon Hills to Kumarakom,” he said.
Efforts are also on to ascertain the Mean Sea Level (MSL) of the river basin at different locations with the support of the government agencies for establishing the water-level scales.
The data to be collected by the gauges through a network of river-reporters will be collated and analysed by a core committee of experts comprising scientists, environmentalists and government officials, before being released to the public through the social media group ‘Save Meenachilar.’
Commenting on the initiative, a senior government official said the community initiative would help mitigate the risk of flooding in the waterbody.
“The existing warning system, which depends on the scales located at only a handful of locations, is insufficient to take into account the impact of extreme weather conditions, location-wise problems and the risk elements,” he pointed out.
Unprecedented
The initiative, according to him, assumes significance as the scale of flooding in the Meenachil has been unprecedented since 2018.
The MRPC has been reporting on the activities in the waterbody through a network of citizen watch groups for the past several years.
