ALTUS – The Lugert-Altus Irrigation District will use its $25 million in federal pandemic relief funds to continue modernizing its nearly 80-year-old water delivery system, General Manager Tom Buchanan said.
“We have a 300-mile gravity-flow system built in the mid-1940s that still has several miles of open-flow dirt ditches,” said Buchanan, of Altus. “We lose about 20% to 25% of our water to seepage into the sand.”
The irrigation district has retained an engineering firm to prepare options for upgrading the water delivery system with the ARPA funds.
“We want to know whether it would be more beneficial to replace some of our ditches with buried 60-inch, impermeable HDPE pipe or to line the dirt canals with a poly liner,” Buchanan said. “We lose very little water through evaporation from our open canals; a bigger problem for us is trash that gets in the ditches.”
The irrigation district encompasses approximately 48,000 acres, and the district’s 330 landowners raise cotton on almost all of it.
The irrigation district has upgraded its water distribution and operating systems over the last 15 years, Buchanan said.
As an illustration, “Every year we put in half a mile or a mile of pipe,” he said. In addition, modern telemetry enables remote transmission of data about the irrigation system from 10 delivery points off the main canal. “I can pull that up on a computer or a mobile phone.”
The improvements have resulted in “significant” savings in water and labor, Buchanan said.
And water savings is a critical factor, considering the environmental conditions with which the irrigation district has coped in recent years.
Buchanan, a cotton farmer since 1980, said there have been “numerous times we released only 3 or 4 inches” from Lugert-Altus, but for three consecutive years, 2012-14, “zero water” was released from the lake. In 2015, producers rejoiced when the reservoir was replenished by rainfall.
However, once again because of the intense heat and drought conditions, the district’s producers “voluntarily chose not to release any water from the lake this year.”
As a direct consequence, this year’s cotton crop “is a disaster,” Buchanan said Sept. 21. Insurance adjusters “arrived last week, and they’re still here.”
Production from this year’s cotton crop will be “negligible,” he said. Federal crop insurance will help, “but it won’t make producers whole,” he added.
The lake is the district’s only source of irrigation water, but the producers also depend on timely rainfall.
“Typically, we get some spring rains,” and then in late June or early July, “we release water from the lake until September,” Buchanan said. Thus, the irrigation district “draws water from Lugert-Altus only about three months out of the year.”
Oklahoma has literally hundreds of agricultural irrigators, but the Lugert-Altus Irrigation District is the only collectively maintained and operated irrigation system in Oklahoma, Buchanan said.
Lake Lugert-Altus was created by the Bureau of Reclamation; construction started in 1940, and impoundment began in 1946 by damming the North Fork of the Red River. In 1990, the irrigation district’s landowners and the city of Altus repaid their debt to the Bureau for building the reservoir, but they never took title to it, Buchanan said.
The lake supplies water primarily for the irrigation district but also is a supplemental water source for the city of Altus, which sells treated water to Altus Air Force Base and several rural water districts.
Although the Bureau of Reclamation still manages the lake, the irrigation district pays for all repairs, maintenance and operations. For example, new flood gates will be installed at the dam at a civil engineer’s estimated cost of $25 million.
“And we’ll have to manage that on our annual operating budget of $2.2 million,” plus any grants the district might receive, Buchanan said.