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On 2 August 2010 the Indus at Taunsa Barrage peaked at 959,991 cusecs, according to the Federal Flood Commission — above the barrage's previous record from July 1958. Upstream at Chashma the day before, the river had passed 1,036,673 cusecs, more than that barrage was designed for.
Sources give the 1958 record differently — 788,646 cusecs in the Flood Commission's report, 760,784 in an engineering paper on the barrage — but on either figure 2010 was higher.
The breach
The water did not come over the barrage; it went round it. The Left Marginal Bund — the embankment that keeps the river in its bed on the Kot Addu side — gave way at Abbas Wala, about 12 km upstream. The first breach was 1,972 metres long, and three more followed. Water from the breach overtopped the Taunsa–Panjnad Link canal and broke the Muzaffargarh Canal in several places.
The Flood Commission lists the settlements that went under between the Muzaffargarh Canal and the river: Kot Addu town, Shaikh Omar, Sinawa, Thatta Gurmani, Gujrat, Mahmood Kot and Ghazi Ghat. A cut was made in the Gattu flood bund below the Ghazi Ghat bridge to let the water back into the Indus.
Dawn, reporting on 4 August, described water entering Kot Addu town, villages about 2 km from the KAPCO power station already flooded, 30,000 people marooned around Daira Din Panah, and 300 trucks pressed into evacuation.
Power, rail, and the aftermath
The flood hit the district's power plants through their fuel. With the PARCO refinery's oil supply cut, the Kot Addu and Lalpir plants were partly shut down: 1,600 MW was generated out of a possible 2,400. The Flood Commission describes generation at KAPCO, AES Lalpir and AES PakGen as badly affected. Electricity in the area was disrupted for almost two months, and about 1.5 km of railway between Kot Addu and Taunsa Barrage stations was destroyed.
The barrage had only just come out of a World Bank–financed rehabilitation, finished in 2008. After the flood, critics argued that the work had not raised and strengthened the protective embankments — the part that failed.
Sources
Facts in this story come from the sources below. Spotted an error? Write to hello@kotaddu.pk.
- Federal Flood Commission — Annual Flood Report 2010
- Sajjad et al. (2019), Applied Ecology and Environmental Research — 2010 flood at Taunsa
- Dawn — Flood hits Kot Addu, threatens Kapco (4 August 2010)
- Pakistan Engineering Congress — Planning and design of Taunsa Barrage rehabilitation
- Wikipedia — Taunsa Barrage
