Operation
Water falling as rain upstream of the reservoir together with any groundwater emerging as springs is stored in the reservoir. Any excess water can be spilled via a specifically designed spillway. Stored water may be piped by gravity for use as drinking water, to generate hydro-electricity or to maintain river flows to support downstream uses. Occasionally reservoirs can be managed to retain high rain-fall events to prevent or reduce downstream flooding. Some reservoirs support several uses and the operating rules may be complex.
Most modern reservoirs have a specially designed draw-off tower that can discharge water from the reservoir at different levels both to access water as the reservoir draws down but also to allow water of a specific quality to be discharged into the downstream river as compensation water.
The operators of many upland or in-river reservoirs have obligations to release water into the downstream river to maintain river quality, support fisheries, maintain downstream industrial and recreational uses or for a range of other requirements. Such releases are known as compensation water.
Read more about this topic: Reservoir
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“Waiting for the race to become official, he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal if the picture was as he guessed it would be.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. The only idea of wit, or rather that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of “Wut,” is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)
“You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don’t have, at the back of your minds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)