Effective efforts: Blast widens Attabad lake spillway

Attempts to drain Attabad Lake intensify as FWO use explosives to widen the spillway.

GILGIT:

Attempts to drain Attabad Lake intensified as the Frontier Works Organisation (FWO) used explosives once again on Saturday to widen the spillway.

“The explosives were detonated at 11:30 am, allowing the spillway to release 30,000 cusecs of water,” Assistant Commissioner Hunza Nagar Momin Jan told The Express Tribune over the phone. Jan said the explosives were placed at a depth of 18 feet below the spillway’s surface.

“As a result, the lake’s water level declined by 22 feet. The lake’s pre-blast depth was 367 feet,” he said.

Last year too, engineers carried out a similar exercise to widen the spillway, but failed.

If the government does not widen the spillway soon, the inflow of water would increase manifold in the wake of melting glaciers and render all its previous efforts to drain the lake ineffective.

An official in Hunza termed the attempt successful, and expressed the hope that the water level would go down in the coming days. He added that Section 144 had been imposed in Hunza for two days to keep the local people away from low-lying areas. Traffic for Gojal, he added, had also been stopped as a precautionary measure.

Announcements were made earlier through mosques and schools, directing local people to stay away from low-lying areas at the time of the blast.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 20^th, 2011.