Oklahoma City firm has new waterline upgrade project in Lawton

An Oklahoma City construction firm has a new contract to handle a waterline upgrade project in north Lawton.

The action comes courtesy of action taken this month by the City Council acting in its capacity as the Lawton Water Authority, approving a resolution of reimbursement pledging that funds pending from a Drinking Water State Revolving Fund loan will be used to reimburse funds from the 2019 Capital Improvements Program. CIP funds were designated as the initial funding source for the waterline project awarded to Southwest Water Works, until the City of Lawton and the Oklahoma Water Resources Board (OWRB) complete the loan.

Public Utilities Director Rusty Whisenhunt said city officials expect to complete the loan by the end of June. But the Public Utilities staff doesn’t want to wait to award the waterline project because Southwest Water Works already is in Lawton completing another project for the City of Lawton. Whisenhunt said his staff wanted to arrange the projects back-to-back, so when Southwest Water Works is done with its existing project it can move directly to the new one.

“We don’t want them to leave town,” he said, explaining a delay in awarding the new project would mean the company would pull out its work crew for another project, meaning a delay in coming back to Lawton to start the new work.

Council members were willing to accept the staff recommendation for Southwest Water Works as the qualified low bidder on what is an $11,347,737 contract to install 31,000 feet of 6-inch, 8-inch and 12-inch waterline in an area north of Lincoln Avenue, between Fort Sill Boulevard and North Sheridan Road. Whisenhunt said the project will rehabilitate lines that have recorded 75 breaks over the past two years. The engineering estimate on the 420-day project was $12,461,817.

City officials are comfortable with the resolution of reimbursement because Lawton has been approved for a $29 million loan from OWRB’s revolving fund, one of multiple loans the City of Lawton is securing to provide the money it needs to upgrade deteriorating water and sewer lines.

In another water-related project, the council approved a new professional services agreement with Worth Hydrochem of Oklahoma to conduct a reverse osmosis (RO) and greensand filtration pilot project on well water, then craft an engineering report on water treatability. The cost of the agreement is not to exceed $463,213.

That agreement is related to a project that is drilling new wells into the Arbuckle-Timbered Hills aquifer that is under much of Comanche County, giving Lawton an alternate source of water to supplement what is now provided by area lakes. One well already drilled and tested in southeast Lawton produces 1.2 million gallons a day (mgd), toward the city’s goal of identifying enough wells to produce 5 mgd.

That original well was tested and it was found that while RO would work to treat the ground water, the use of a polymer coagulant would not provide the required treatment level.

Test wells being drilled under a $9.223 million project awarded in January will be further tested with a pilot process, under a directive from the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality. The RO treatment will be used in conjunction with the greensand (manganese oxide) filtration system, with Worth Hydrochem (which did the test on the original well) handling the work. Testing is expected to take 12 weeks.