Ponda: Despite a weaker monsoon spell this season, the Mhaisal dam at Panchawadi, Shiroda, has reached 40% storage, offering some relief to farmers and residents dependent on the irrigation project.Officials and local observers said the rise has come through intermittent rainfall and sustained inflow over recent days, even as overall precipitation has remained below expectations across parts of the region.The Mhaisal dam, which caters to the drinking water needs of Panchawadi and Shiroda villages, breached its mark on July 2 last year.The 230m-long dam’s full reservoir level (FRL) is 22m with a total live storage of 436.8 hectare metre (HaM). Around 10 to 12 million litres per day (MLD) water is fetched by a 10 MLD water treatment plant of the department of drinking water (DDW) situated on the hill at Panchawadi. While the treated water is supplied to the villages, the remaining is used for irrigation.The dam has a comparatively small catchment area that has been spread over only 4.13 sqkm.The dam is located amid deep forest and very rarely visited by people. However, some picnickers are seen near the water release point of the dam to have the first glimpse of the overflowing dam.In 2025, for the first time in 16 years of records, the Mhaisal dam had began overflowing in the first week of July. The dam has even seen a critical situation in the summer of 2022, when the water storage dipped to 0.9% and the WRD had to gather water from the naturally formed pits inside the dam’s drying reservoir. The WRD and water department had even used floating pumps to draw water from the dam’s reservoirs.
