Chickasha buys water from Fort Cobb Lake, and the quality of the water processed in the city’s aged treatment plant is marginal. “Our water is good, but not that good,” City Manager Jim Crosby acknowledged.
Chickasha’s contract with the Fort Cobb Master Conservancy District allows the municipality to draw up to 5,125 acre-feet of water (almost 1.67 billion gallons) per year, Office Manager Ginger Abbott told Southwest Ledger.
The city’s water consumption totaled 1.037 billion gallons in calendar year 2022 and 1.093 billion gallons in 2023, FCMCD records reflect. But usage soared to 4,988.95 acre-feet – 1.625 billion gallons – in 2024, and almost 1.538 billion gallons in 2025, FCMCD’s meters showed.
As the community grows, “We will not receive any more water rights from our present source, Fort Cobb Reservoir,” Crosby said previously. “I think our water rights will be reduced” by the Master Conservancy District, he said during a City Council meeting in December 2024.
FCMCD “wants us to find an alternative source of water” to supplement Chickasha’s withdrawals from Fort Cobb Lake, former mayor Chris Mosley told the Ledger.
“Our best and only [alternative] source is water from Lake Chickasha,” Crosby said. Consequently, in the future Chickasha plans to blend water from Fort Cobb Lake with water from Lake Chickasha.
Lake Chickasha water has “a lot of gypsum,” former City Councilman Brian Gerdes noted.
“It’s something we’ll have to treat in the new water plant,” Crosby acknowledged.
Research performed on Lake Chickasha three decades ago by the state Conservation Commission detected “high sulfate concentrations originating from gypsum deposits in the geologic formations under the lake …” Water quality data collected as part of the state’s lake assessment program also indicated high levels of dissolved solids and elevated levels of chlorophyll-a, which is a measure of algal biomass that is used to indicate or determine productivity in a lake. “The more chlorophyll-a is detected, the greater the level of algae,” an Oklahoma Water Resources Board official told the Ledger.
Lake Chickasha is located in Caddo County, near Verden, approximately nine miles west of Chickasha. The lake was impounded in 1958, OWRB records reflect.
To ensure that Lake Chickasha will be a viable source of drinking water as well as a recreational destination, the City of Chickasha is in the process of raising the lake level by 10 feet, Crosby announced in December 2024.
“It will probably take several years,” perhaps a decade, to elevate the lake level by 10 feet, he said.