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The Oklahoma City Water Utilities Trust: Providing Reliable, Award-Winning Water Service to Central Oklahoma
The OCWUT's Atoka spillway project.
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he Oklahoma City Water Utilities Trust (OCWUT) is Oklahoma’s largest provider of drinking water, treating and delivering an average of 100 million gallons a day (MGD) of water to more than 1.4 million residents through retail and wholesale service connections. The trust also provides wastewater and trash collection services to residential, commercial, and industrial customers across central Oklahoma. In this interview, Oklahoma City Utilities Director Chris Browning tells us more about the OCWUT and its mission. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Chris Browning: More than 40 years ago, I started as a laborer at a wastewater treatment plant. As I observed the multifaceted nature of the sector, it didn’t take long to figure out that there were many career opportunities throughout the industry, so I began advancing through the ranks, working in every business unit that exists in a water utility, mostly in the Atlanta metro area. In 2014, I moved to Texas to take a job as a public works director. In 2016, I moved to Oklahoma City to become the utilities director for Oklahoma City and the general manager of the OCWUT. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about the history of the OCWUT.
18 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | January 2022
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PHOTO COURTESY OF THE OCWUT.
Chris Browning: Oklahoma City is situated right at the center of the United States. We get about 35 inches of rain per year. Oklahoma City developed as a city in about a day as a result of the 1889 Land Run. It went from just a few people to being a city of 10,000 in a very short period of time. Therefore, water became critical. The Oklahoma River, also known as the North Canadian River, runs right through town.
However, it dries up in the summertime. Originally, the folks who moved here depended on purchasing water by the bucket from the stationmaster at the Santa Fe depot. Because that was not sustainable, plans were launched to put in 19 wells along the river with the capacity to draw 1 MGD. But when the river dried up in the summer, so did the wells. Thus, in 1917, the city decided to build a surface water treatment plant and a large lake that would act as a water reservoir. The project had a price tag of a million dollars, which was pretty substantial, but it was a good investment, and the system and Lake Overholser are still operational today. However, as the population continued to grow, it became clear that Lake Overholser alone could not keep up with the escalating demand of the growing city, and in 1950, the city built Lake Hefner to serve as an additional water collection reservoir. Despite these efforts, the maximum capacity of the North Canadian River and recurring droughts still limited growth in central Oklahoma. To overcome that, in the 1960s, city leaders decided they needed to look beyond our immediate region for additional sources of water. They eventually settled on an area in southeastern Oklahoma that averages 50 inches of rainfall per year. We built a plant and Lake Stanley Draper in southeastern Oklahoma City and another lake in Atoka, Oklahoma. We pump the water from Atoka 100 miles through a 60‑inch pipeline to Lake Stanley Draper. Continued growth eventually led the city to purchase water storage and water rights in a number of federal reservoirs as well. Our footprint is large. We bought the storage rights and water rights from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers–owned Canton Lake to provide water from the west. We also bought the storage and water rights tied to two more lakes in McGee Creek and Sardis in southeastern Oklahoma. The result is that today, the OCWUT relies on a water supply system that stretches 250 miles across
