korba Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh , Maharashtra, Gujarat and Goa are coping with reduced power supply after a damaged fly ash dam in Korba grounded power generation at four units of the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC).
In Dhanras village, not too far from the NTPC's Korba power station, a bleak wasteland of grey extends in an endless and forbidding expanse above the village. Here, a maze of pipelines disgorges slurry saturated with fly ash over 4.5 sq km of raised ground enclosed within high embankment walls.
Fly ash is a powdery grey hazardous byproduct when coal is burnt to produce power. Deposited in the form of slurry at Dhanras, NTPC's only ash dam site, it dries into layers of grey dust, as an industrial sized sieve consisting of an inclined wall called spillway separates the ash from water.
