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It means water supply to the two beneficiaries of the dam — Karachi and Lasbella — will halt when water in the reservoir touches the dead storage level of 276 RL, which is only 15 feet away from now.
“At present, water level in the dam's reservoir is 291 RL and the supply from the source to both Karachi and Lasbella is suspended when it touches its dead storage level of 276 RL,” Wapda resident engineer at the Hub dam Nisar Memon told Dawn.
Well-informed sources said the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board and the Balochistan government would soon be informed that if they continued to draw the present quantity of water from the dam, its supply from the source would come to an end in the next seven to eight months.
Karachi gets 100 million gallons of water daily from the Hub dam, and the localities hooked to the dam include Orangi, Baldia, Surjani and SITE (both residential and industrial areas) towns, Saeedabad, Mianwali Colony, Qasba, Disco Mor, Shershah and parts of North Karachi. The sources said that although the catchment area of the dam, located on the Hub River, comprised Dadu district, Khirthar National Park, Saruna, Dureji and the Shah Noorani area in Balochistan, it had received no rain in the current monsoon.
However, officials manning the Hub dam project are optimistic that its catchment area might receive rains in the remaining part of the current monsoon.
The monsoon normally begins on June 15 and continues till Aug 15 and, as such, the possibility of rains in the dam's catchment area cannot be ruled out, they say.
The sources said in case the dam's catchment area remained dry in the ongoing monsoon, both beneficiaries would have to curtail their quota of supply as they had done previously to ensure that their supply continued till the next summer.
Tracing the Hub dam's history, the sources said that it was completed in June 1981 and it had been supplying water to Karachi since then.
It, however, first went dry in July 1999 when its lake touched the lowest level of 272 feet against its dead storage level of 276 feet. This was because the dam's catchment area had remained dry for the previous four monsoons, resulting in a complete stoppage of supply to the city on July 14, 1999.
However, supply from the Hub dam was restored in Aug 2001 after its catchment area had received rains in 2000. Supply from the dam was once again stopped in Oct 2002 and restored in June 2003.
Its catchment area had not received a single drop of rainwater in both the summer and winter of 2004 and 2005.
Having a total storage capacity of 339 feet (RL), water from the dam has spilled over to the Arabian Sea six times — in 1984, 1989, 1992, 1994, 1995 and 2003 — since it became operational and started supplying water to both Karachi and Lasbella.
Water supply to the city from the Hub source was last stopped in October 2002, when the water level in the dam's reservoir had touched its dead storage level of 276 RL. Soon after the suspension of the supply from the source, the KWSB had introduced a water-holiday system for the localities getting supply from the Indus source to overcome the water crisis.
The sources said the KWSB could continue to draw water from Hub even beyond seven to eight months if it decided to curtail its present quantity of supply from the source and the utility could offset the shortage in the localities hooked to the Hub source by diverting some quantity of water from the Indus source as they had done in October 2002, when water level in the dam's reservoir touched the dead storage level of 276 RL.
The water utility during this period, the sources recalled, had introduced the water-holiday system once a week in certain city areas getting water from the Indus source on a rotation basis and had diverted the same to the localities hooked to the Hub dam source.
