WAURIKA – The staff at the Waurika Lake Master Conservancy District has taken steps to ensure that the pipeline from the lake to Temple’s water treatment plant is protected from “water hammer.”
Water hammer “is what happens when a valve closes too quickly,” said David Taylor, district manager of the WLMCD.“
We have ways to combat that,” he said. One way is to limit the volume of water flowing through the valve, “but the best way is to close the valve more slowly,” he said. “As low reduction will bleed that pressure off.”
Under the original design of the pipeline, Temple's share of water from Waurika Lake was pumped to the Cotton County town’s small lake, and from there it was pumped to the city’s water treatment plant."
But it became more efficient to send the water from Waurika Lake directly to Temple’s treatment plant,” Taylor said. “That gave us better control over the valve” in the water line, he explained. The valve at the town’s meter house is eight inches in diameter.
Some work on the valve has already been performed and additional improvements are planned, Taylor said.
Temple has dual water supplies – “enough to feed their water plant at all times,” Taylor said – which is a benefit considering current climate conditions.
Waurika Lake shrunk to a dangerously low level in 2015 during a protracted drought, falling by 20 feet: from 952 feet mean sea level at the top of the conservation pool in January 2010 to 932.5 feet msl by May 2015.
At that point the lake capacity was just 28%. However, sedimentation of the intake structure and the channel had reduced the amount of available water to less than 11%, engineering consultant Diane Smith and Associates calculated. Heavy rains later that year replenished the reservoir.
Waurika Lake impounds Beaver Creek and covers 10,114 surface acres in Jefferson and Stephens counties plus a small portion in Cotton County. At capacity the lake’s volume is 151,400 acre-feet (49billion gallons) of water and its maximum depth is 52 feet, according to the Oklahoma Water Resources Board.
The lake was built in the latter half of the 1970s and provides drinking water to an estimated population of 250,000 in Lawton, Waurika, Duncan, Temple, Walters and Comanche via 100 miles of pipelines.