Cattleman Mark Fuss spent $8,000 to drill two wells on his sprawling ranch about 10 miles east of Stillwater, gambling he would strike water.
Don and Nancy Griffin of nearby Yale are watering their trees and plants with rainwater collected in two 50-gallon barrels.
Yale’s 1,250 residents are bracing for a summer in which they might have to boil water for drinking, if the town can even muster enough pumping power to deliver well water to their faucets.
Across the rolling farm and ranch lands of the Lone Chimney Water District, residents are coping with one of the most severe water shortages in Oklahoma. Lone Chimney Lake, the only water supply for customers in four counties, has dropped to its lowest level since 1985, when the lake was created with the damming of Camp Creek.
Payne County commissioners have issued a declaration of emergency. Town officials are scrambling for backup water sources. The district’s 16,000 customers nervously await the day that Lone Chimney Lake has no more water to deliver.
Help is on the way, as construction crews are building a 12-mile pipeline from Stillwater’s water treatment plant to Lone Chimney’s water distribution system. But the project isn’t expected to be finished until July or August.
“I’m worried,” said Carl Hensley, one of the Lone Chimney Water Association’s nine board members. “We’re running out of water quickly.”
Lone Chimney’s plight is an extreme example of the effects of Oklahoma’s severe drought. But the ways residents are adapting could foreshadow what many other Oklahomans will be forced to do, on their own or by mandate, should the three-year-old drought persist.
Despite rain and snow in February, most of the state remains in “severe,” “extreme” or “exceptional” drought status. Farm ponds throughout central and western Oklahoma are dry for the first time in decades; lake levels have plummeted. Some cities have enacted mandatory water restrictions, such as assigning lawn-watering days. State and local officials have urged people to conserve water, publicizing ways to do so.
The efforts may work well with some, less so with others. In the Lone Chimney area, pleas to conserve are buttressed by the very real fact that access to any water is in jeopardy, at least for now. That means residents have become a test case of sorts for how much people will adjust their water use when faced with a crisis.
Not that citizens are moving in lockstep. “I’m sure a lot of people still don’t know what’s about to happen,” Hensley said.
Lone Chimney’s Drought
The Lone Chimney Water Association is a private organization that pumps water out of the lake, treats it at a shore-side plant and distributes it through an 87-mile labyrinth of pipelines. The district serves users in Payne, Noble, Pawnee and Lincoln counties.
Seven years ago Lone Chimney Lake dipped to unprecedented low levels during a then-historic drought, causing people and towns to scramble to draw up emergency plans. Then, rains replenished the lake, and some residents say everyone returned to business as usual.
The current drought is more severe. The lake is 11½ feet below average, surpassing the previous low of 10 feet in 2006. The water is four feet above the lake’s last intake valve. If the valve is reached, workers will be forced to activate a submerged pump, which would require increased water treatment and testing of oxygen levels.
“We’re not sure how much longer we’ll be able to provide water,” said J.J. Dooley, the association’s distribution operator. “Since we’re a wholesale distributor, it’s not like we can issue mandates on water rationing like a city can. All we can do is send out notices, asking people to cut back.”
Work crews have built more than six miles of the 12-mile pipeline, a $3.4 million project financed by a 30-year loan from the Oklahoma Water Resources Board. Water district administrators believe the project is still five months from completion.
If the lake water runs out beforehand, member towns will be on their own. Glencoe, a Payne County town of 600, is especially vulnerable: The town has no backup water source, except for a water tower.
“From what I understand, if Lone Chimney shuts down, Glencoe will only have enough water in its tower to last three hours,” said Zachary Cavett, a Payne County commissioner who lives east of the town.
Wells or Bust
Worried that lack of water will endanger their cattle, some ranchers are digging their own wells.
Fuss, the cattleman, whose ranch is a few miles southeast of the lake, said he dug his two wells for $8,000 because he was fed up with the stress of the shortage and the $400 to $500 a month he was paying the water association. The association has raised rates and imposed surcharges in recent years.
“Best money I ever spent,” declared Fuss. “The more water I used, the more they charged me … So I dug my own wells.”
Decisions like Fuss’s are not made lightly.
“I was lucky we struck water,” Fuss said. “I have a neighbor six miles to the north who dug for water and found nothing. Another neighbor a mile east of me dug and didn’t get enough water to water his garden.”
Cavett, the Payne County commissioner, drilled two wells on his property near Glencoe. Both were dry.
“Drilling wells is a gamble in this region,” Cavett said. “Even if you hit water, you don’t know if it will be drinkable because the sulphur content can sometimes be very high.”
Oklahoma law allows property owners to drill for water with few restrictions if the water is for household purposes, farm or domestic animals, or irrigation of gardens, orchards or lawns up to three acres. Well drillers must get a state license, and their wells must be built to regulation to prevent contaminants from seeping into groundwater.
An alternative to drilling is to haul water, bought from nearby towns or friends.
Yale cattle rancher Roy Matlock hauled water daily to his cattle for five months last summer with a 275-gallon tank mounted to his truck.
The 17-mile round trip and the fear of losing cattle forced him to sell 15 cows and 30 calves. For now, the remainder of his herd grazes on his acreage on the outskirts of Yale, drinking water from a dwindling pond.
“If this drought continues,” Matlock said, “I’ll be out of the cattle business in two years.”
Boiling and Treating
Although well water suffices for cattle, it presents complications for people in homes and businesses.
In Yale and Terlton, wells might be the only hope for water if Lone Chimney Lake runs dry. Yale leaders are banking on three six-year-old wells in case of an emergency. The wells are only 20 feet deep and under normal circumstances their water would need treatment to meet federal standards, said Yale City Manager Clara Welch.
Yet she said there would be no time to properly treat the water. Yale residents would have to boil their water.
Even, so “we’re just not sure we can generate enough power from our pumps to provide water to the entire town.”
Yale also is building a $650,000 water treatment plant scheduled for completion in August. That facility would treat water drawn from wells, but won’t be completed in time to help this summer should Lone Chimney shut down.
“I’m concerned,” Welch said, “but I would be a lot more concerned if we didn’t have those wells.”
In Terlton, a town of 35 in Pawnee County, “we have four wells drilled, but they’re 20 years old,” said Jon Harrod, manager of the district’s distribution plans in the town. The Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality shut them down years ago because of high iron and manganese levels. “We’re hoping DEQ would allow us to use those wells, but DEQ won’t let us know until if and when that time arrives,” Harrod said
Terlton could drill two new wells within a week, at a cost $75,000 and with the risk of high iron and manganese, he said.
Conserving at Home
In Yale, some citizens say they are doing their part to conserve water.
Nancy and Don Griffin refused to plant flowers this fall, watched two trees die and water trees and plants from the rainwater barrels. In the house, they only wash large loads of clothes and recycle water when possible. They flush toilets as little as possible.
“Do you want water in the tap or do you want beautiful trees?” Nancy Griffin said. “It’s just the choices we have to make right now.”
Hensley, the water association board member, said he refuses to wash his vehicle in town, reuses dishwater and has let his lawn turn brown.
“We had a tree we planted 50 years ago die on us,” Hensley said. “We lost a great shade tree, but we’re just trying to do our part.”
In Glencoe, longtime resident and town clerk Shelly Andrews began conserving about three years ago.
“We lost a lot of outdoor plants. We turn off the faucets whenever we’re brushing our teeth or washing our hands,” she said. “Whenever I clean out the dog’s water bowl, I always dump the dirty water into a plant vase.
To the northwest, in Morrison, the drought offers a far different experience. It is largely an afterthought.
“I’m proud to say we were prepared,” said Rick McSwain, longtime bank president. During the last drought, “we tapped into Rural Water District No. 2 – water straight from Stillwater. A few months ago, when things started to get real bad, we just switched on the valve and tapped into essentially Stillwater’s water. We have plenty of water.”
The town, with 756 residents, also replaced its antiquated water lines. The $1.1 million project saved roughly 500,000 gallons of water alone from leaks, McSwain said.
While Morrison conserves water, “to be honest, I doubt people around here are doing anything different than they normally would with their water usage,” McSwain said.
Motive to Save
Lone Chimney members have been blitzed with conservation literature attached to their monthly bills for two years. Some evidence indicates they decreased their usage.
Water district customers cut back nearly 4 million gallons of water a month from December to February, according to Hensley, the association board member. But some of that decrease can be attributed to member towns like Morrison and Agra going off association water.
A closer gauge of conservation can be found in the district’s distribution plants.
Terlton is part of the Pawnee Rural Water District 2, which serves 1,775 customers. The customers were asked to conserve and reduced their water use per capita from 6,278 gallons a month in July to 3,119 gallons in February, a Terlton administrator said. Part of that drop was due to the change of seasons, but town officials were impressed.
Yale residents also were urged late last summer to reduce their water use. The townspeople, who consumed 5.9 million gallons of water in July, responded by using only 3.2 million gallons in October, said Welch, the city manager.
“They heard our pleas, and responded in a big way,” Welch said.
Research may provide a clearer picture on what worked best in promoting conservation.
Tracy Boyer, a conservation expert and an associate professor in agricultural economics at Oklahoma State University, is overseeing an honor student’s study of the district, focusing on Glencoe.
“We looked at non-paid and paid incentives,” Boyer said. “We’ve found that people will generally voluntarily cut back on their water usage as long as there is publicity to remind them. But once those promotional campaigns begin to fade, people fall back into their old habits.
“Ultimately,” Boyer said, “the best way for people to conserve water is when it hits them financially.”
The Lone Chimney association has raised its water rates twice in the past two years to spur conservation. The association plans to raise them again to help pay for the pipeline. The district also has imposed surcharges on the first 1,000 and 2,000 gallons consumed.
Such hikes could be in store for many other Oklahomans if the drought continues. Oklahoma City is studying whether to charge higher water rates for consumers who use above-normal amounts.
The state also has made conservation a priority. Last year, the Legislature approved the Water for 2060 Act, which sets a goal that Oklahoma consume no more fresh water in 2060 than was consumed in 2012.
‘Just Not Enough’
Dooley, the distribution operator, looked outside his water district office last month at the rain and sleet pelting Lone Chimney Lake and flashed a half-hearted grin.
“The moisture is good,” he said. “But it’s just enough to fall into the cracks. The ground is so dry.”
Dooley recently fixed 12 leaks in pipelines near the Lone Chimney distribution plant because of the dry, cracking soil. The recent moisture will certainly buy some time, but not enough to ease minds or end a drought.
“It’s just not enough,” he said.
He shook his head in disbelief, quietly adding, “This is the worst I’ve ever seen.”
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