Soan Reservoir

Soan Reservoir site stretches from Dhok Pathan bridge towards Rawalpindi.

To collect South Punjab's flood water share, 15 to 17 MAF lake will be enough.
In order to make it a national reservoir, 35-38 MAF will be "optimum over-design".
Thus Sparing 6-8 MAF for Indus delta flows, and 25-30 MAF for winter and late spring water needs in all provinces.

Picture is worth a thousand words, following two maps shows lake sizes for 17 and 38 MAF capacity.

17 MAF Soan Lake

39 MAF Soan Lake

 

Soan Dam Comparison

Here are two graphs showing the comparison of Soan Dam vs other alternatives.

First graph shows the storage capacity, Soan valley can collect much more water than all other options put together.

Price wise it is very economical for unit storage, again 6-10 times cheaper than others

 

The Indus of Pakistan

I made this short documentary last year.

It was made to educate people about Indus river, its blessings, sorrows and solutions to them.

Here are links

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10151343108971478&set=vb.537506477&type=2&theater

Vimeo: for Pakistan where youtube is banned

http://vimeo.com/62972400

 

Youtube Video

 

 

 

Soan Dam: Bright future of Pakistan

I have to jump to a different topic today.After that we will go back to our regular topics list, to resume the general learning curve.
I have published this topic in Urdu to soften the sudden jump of concepts.

Back in 2010, I designed a detailed flood control system for Pakistan, to tame and harvest super floods. It includes several proposed sites for large scale water storage. I presented it at govt level in Pakistan in Jan 2011.

two years later, it is elections season and I feel that people of Pakistan have a right of awareness and discussion over this topic.
Back in December 2012, media wasted a whole month of prime air time about Lahore High court's decision on Kalabagh dam. They need better topics.

I am not sure if it will get due attention in next 4-5 weeks, but I have to do my part.
I will publish seversal posts on this topic, including video and some technical details.

[update on 6/6/2013] Elections are over with new govt in place now. I guess WAPDA already knows and remembers Soan dam, but govt. and media needs to pay some attention to ideas like this in middle of shambled economy and prevailing hopelessness.
This is much better option than IMF/WB bail-outs or foreign aid.



Here is urdu summary of the project.

 

Lakes (1)

Lake is a natural or man made water body of significat size with relatively still water.
There are various natural types of lakes. We will discuss important types by example.
We start with mountain lakes.
Mountains and river valleys of Northern Pakistan have formed through a constant process of landslides.
Rain, glaciers and stream water erodes and dissolves the base of all vallies that seeds further landslides. This process is very slow but never stops.
After every landslide ,stream or river in that valley tries to burst that natural dam. outcome depends upon size of river and landslide.
If stream is too small as compared to landslide, valley becomes a longer term lake, with a thin and long spillway and some waterfalls. Lake Saiful Muluk is one such example.

Attabad lake is a recent example of such phenomenon.
Attabad's landslide blocked Hunza river in 2010. Although river has better flowrate at that location, but amount of landslide was too big. This natural Lake will stay for a long time.

Pakistan is land of geographical extremes, and holds the record of biggest flood of recorded history. in Jan 1841, A Spur of Nanaga Parbat collapsed and blocked Indus river for about six months. This made a thousand meters high natural dam, that ultimately bursted in June 1841. estimated flow rate  of the flood wave was 190 lakh cusecs, about 20 times more than 2010 floods.


Another example is the lake Pangogng Tso, inside Indian occupied Kashmir and Tibet. About a hundred thousand years ago, this lake was cut-off from Indus river due to a massive landslide. This lake was the shooting site of last scenes of Bollywood movie 3 Idiots.

 

Pakistan's total annual water

Pakistan gets about 142 MAF of river water every year. I'v seen people arguing this figure for political reasons, and they say that actual annual water is as low as 106 MAF. we will discuss the cause and effects of this debate later, but let us see, how much water is it.

In first picture below, 142 MAF cube is parked near Karachi's international airport.
Second picture is zoomed out to compare it with map of Pakistan.

same water is hardly visible on map of Pakisatn

 

MAF cusecs relation

We read a lot of news about 'x' MAF of storage, or 'y' lakhs (hundred thousands) of cusecs of water, but do we know that how these two are related to each other?
Relation between these two can be explained in a single following line

"One MAF water is equal to 5 lakh cusecs flow for 24 hours"

We saw in flow example, flow rate depends upon volume change over a given time period.
This relation can be defined by a simple equation as following.

       flow = volume change / time

(Note: in engineering, symbol used for flowrate is Q, intutively it is a bit mis-guiding for non engineers, but F is reserved for force)

defining this relationship in SI units is much easier.
Example
we want to empty a lake of size 1 BCM ( billion cubic meter or a cubic kilometer).
lake has five drain tunnels, 1 cumec, 10 cumecs, 100 cumecs, 1000 cumecs and 10000 cumecs.
calculate the time for emptying the lake using each tunnel individually.

solution
we know that 
  flow = volume/time
 or  time = flow/volume
using this relationship, times taken for each tunnel to drain this lake are

1 cumec tunnel will take 1 billion seconds (more than 31 years) to drain this 1 BCM capacity lake
10 cumec tunnel will take 100 million seconds (about 3 years and 2 months) to drain this 1 BCM capacity lake
100 cumec tunnel will take 10 million seconds (about 17 weeks) to drain this 1 BCM capacity lake
1000 cumec tunnel will take 1 million seconds (about 12 days) to drain this 1 BCM capacity lake
10000 cumec tunnel will take 100000 seconds (about 28 hours) to drain this 1 BCM capacity lake

so, its not difficult to calculate these, but ...........we don't use metric units in Pakistan.
We use cusecs and MAF instead,  which adds an additional step in the relation.

concept is same, flow = volume/time, but we have to plug the value of acre foot (1 acre foot = 43560 cubic feet)
let us do some realistic math in next example.
Example
Tarbela's reservoir has a live storage capacity of 6.8 MAF.
with net impounded inflow of 200000 cusecs, how many days will it take to fill the lake?

Solution
don't worry about the complex terms involved, concept is as simple as tub and tap.
we simply have to plug in the value of 1 acre foot = 43560 cubic feet
let's do it.
we know that flow  = volume/time
hence   time = volume/flow
or  time = (6800000 acre foot)/(200000 cusec)
      time = (6800000  x 43560)/(200000 cusec)
      time = 1481040 seconds
 or            17.14 days

a useful conversion thumb rule
  volume = flow x time
  volume (acre feet in one second)     = (cusecs /43560)
  Volume (MAF in a day) = (cusecs x 86400) / (43560 x 1000000)

another example
Calculate volume of water involved in a flow of 500000 cusecs for one day
  Volume (MAF in a day) = (cusecs x 86400) / (43560 x 1000000)
       = 500000 x 86400) / (43560 x 1000000)
       = 0.99173 MAF
      
  in short, 5 lakh cusecs flow for a day involves about one MAF water