Business View - February 2016 105
ter. But the drought broke, so they shelved everything
and forgot about it. We pulled those plans down; staff
and our public works department started looking at
them, and went to work in April 2012. We put a plan
together and decided we needed to proceed with that
program, so we contacted the Texas Commission on
Environmental Quality (TCEQ), our regulatory agency,
and after two years of wrangling with them and mak-
ing sure they were comfortable with what we were
proposing, we went live in July of 2014, treating our
wastewater effluent.”
Now, Barham knew that “when you start us-
ing that type of water, you’re going to have a
lot of public opinion issues.” So in order to
assure the citizens that the treated wastewa-
ter from the MFRO plant was absolutely safe
to drink, the city enlisted the aid of the Wichi-
ta County Medical Director, a local physician,
and two professors from nearby Midwestern
State University. “We took those folks on a
tour of our wastewater plant; we took them
over to our water treatment facility where the
MFRO plant was; we showed them what we
proposed to do and those four people put to-
gether, with our staff’s assistance, about a
30-minute program explaining in detail what
the city was proposing and their thoughts
and feelings about it. The four of them sup-
ported us on the project and we hired a pub-
lic relations firm to help us. We didn’t want to
make a big deal out of it, yet we wanted folks
to be well aware that we were now using ef-
fluent water in our distribution system.”
With the plans in place, the city’s engineers
and public works department went to work,
building a 13-mile pipeline in order to get
the treated wastewater from the wastewa-
ter plant over to the MF/RO plant located
at the Cypress Water Treatment plant. “We laid that
pipe above ground,” Barham says. “Fortunately, we
had a flood control project that had been built in the
early ‘80s that came to an end close to the wastewater
plant, so we actually laid that pipe on the floor of that
storm water runoff, called Holiday Creek, and then we
went over ground, through some irrigation canals, un-
der a couple of roads, and ultimately ran that pipeline
to the MF/RO plant.”
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