Four spill gates at the Deduru Oya Reservoir have been opened by one foot each after heavy rainfall pushed water levels up, and the Irrigation Department has warned residents living along the riverbanks downstream to stay alert.
Water is being discharged into the Deduru Oya at 2,800 cubic feet per second as a result, the Daily Mirror reported on Monday evening.
The department said levels downstream may fluctuate while the gates are open, and asked people in the affected areas to follow the periodic announcements it issues alongside disaster management authorities as the release continues. The public has been advised to take precautions in response to any change in water levels.
Where this sits in the current wet spell
The opening is the latest in a sequence of reservoir releases through a prolonged period of heavy rain. This desk reported on spill gates opening at Polgolla, Victoria and Thabbowa on 26 October, when Kala Wewa stood at 103 per cent of capacity and Thabbowa and Inginimitiya were together releasing 7,400 cusecs into the Mee Oya.
The rain has not stopped since. The Met Department raised its rainfall warning on Monday to above 75 mm at some places across six provinces — the North-Western among them — as Cyclone Murasu intensified in the Bay of Bengal on a track towards the Andhra Pradesh coast rather than Sri Lanka.
The Disaster Management Centre’s running count of damage from the late-October storm period and the unsettled weather around it stands at six dead, three missing and 745 damaged houses between 23 October and 1 November. Those figures predate Monday’s release and do not include it.
A caution on identifying this event
Spill-gate openings at Deduru Oya are a recurring headline, and several distinct releases have been reported at this reservoir within the past few weeks alone, with different gate counts and discharge rates each time. The event described here is specifically the Monday 2 November release: four gates, one foot each, 2,800 cubic feet per second. Earlier reports describing two gates, or six gates at four feet, are separate openings and not this one.
Not reported
The filing does not give the reservoir’s current storage level or percentage of capacity, name the downstream divisional secretariats or villages most at risk, say how long the gates are expected to remain open, or state whether any evacuation or flood warning has been issued for the lower Deduru Oya basin. No second verified newsroom had carried this specific release at the time of writing, and Ada Derana — which has covered earlier openings — remained unreachable from this desk.