Cedar Lake is surrounded by about 500 houses, dotted throughout a one-square-mile warren of hilly dirt roads. Most of them resemble camp cabins or midcentury bungalows. Some are luxurious; many are dilapidated.
All of the homes rely on groundwater wells. But some of them have started to run dry.
Belinda Smith moved into her house in 2023. Her well stopped producing water just eight months later.
"It just dried up," Smith said. "We've been hauling water ever since. Until [a neighbor] came out here, and she got me hooked up where I got water coming in the house where I could take a shower and do my dishes, which is a blessing."
Before she got the large plastic tank full of clean water, Smith had been hauling it from a community spigot or a neighbor's still-operational well.
Her next-door neighbor, Paula McUsic, still has well water. But she really only uses it to flush the toilet.
"I noticed a couple of years ago that my water started — I could taste like it was dirty," McUsic said.
Her pump went out in June. She got it replaced, but it didn't solve all the problems.
"When I was out here a week ago [in late July], I changed out the aerators and then the toilet valve, because they were all clogged up with grit," she said.
McUsic doesn't live at the lake full-time, which allows her to prepare food before she heads there and then take dirty dishes back to her Newcastle home to wash. But fulltime residents, like Smith, don't have that option.
And it's not just the underground water supplies that are running low. The community's centerpiece, the lake itself, has shrunk. Docks dangle yards above the water, and boats languish on ground that's normally submerged.
Many of the residents have generations of history at Cedar Lake, and they're not willing to leave. Even if they wanted to, McUsic said, the lack of water could sink property values.
"What are you going to do if the whole area dries up?" McUsic said. "Everybody has invested time, money, blood, sweat and tears in their property. And suddenly it's not worth anything."
Delinquent dams
Cedar Lake is a private community about an hour's drive west of downtown Oklahoma City. It was founded in the late-1950s by a group called the Western Sportsman Club.
"They wanted to have a place to go hunting and fishing," resident Don Machacek said. "Now I'm not sure about this, but the older old-timers were telling me the Western Sportsman Club, they actually were down at the state fairgrounds selling lots with a little cabin — about a 300 square foot cabin — for $1,250 total. That's in the '50s."
In 1960, the Western Sportsman Club acquired water rights to some of the streamflow in the small watershed surrounding Cedar Lake.
But now the lake is remarkably low — 8 feet down from its capacity, by residents' estimates. And for more than a year, residents have suspected upstream dams of drying up the lake.
Machacek said he was the first to realize there were unpermitted dams upstream. He was looking at satellite images of the area when he saw an unexpected reservoir just southwest of Cedar Lake.
"I'm looking at Google Earth, and then I swing over and I see that lake and I go, 'What is that? I've never heard of that lake,'" Machacek said.
Soon after Machacek's discovery, the Oklahoma Water Resources Board (OWRB) received an anonymous complaint about the dwindling water at Cedar Lake and the unpermitted dams.
The dams are owned by companies connected to former state senator Glenn Coffee, who now works as the Senate Republican Caucus' political strategist.
StateImpact reached out to Coffee's attorney but did not hear back before publication.
There are multiple dams on the Coffee property, and six fall under the OWRB's regulatory authority.
Two of those dams are capturing water from 40% of Cedar Lake's small watershed, according to an independent survey from water quality firm Johnson-Becker.
The OWRB has also undertaken an investigation and released some of its findings late last month. It points to multiple factors in Cedar Lake's decline, saying drought, evaporation and inadequate stream flow could be behind the dramatic drop.
Hydrologists with the board found evaporation losses have outpaced flow in an already small stream system. The lake has not been full since 2019, according to the report. That's when the newest of the Coffee dams was built.
The Western Sportsman Club gives Cedar Lake rights to 163 acre-feet per year. That appropriation is meant to replace water that evaporates from the lake.
The OWRB's report doesn't say whether the dams could be affecting water levels at Cedar Lake. But it does say the Western Sportsman Club still has access to the 163 acre-feet per year it's entitled too. It also says the dams are "not likely to be the cause of the groundwater level decline."
Some Cedar Lake residents disagree. The Cedar Lake Dam Committee, which consists of four residents, released a statement Sept. 8 saying the OWRB's report contains errors and half-truths.
They accuse the board of "literally ignoring Hydrology 101."
"The report makes many dubious representations and we are honestly not sure why OWRB would be making them to public officials when they are not accurate," four Cedar Lake residents said in the press release. "If you build huge dams across a lake's two primary feeder creeks, the lake will eventually go dry. OWRB is trying to blame everything but the dams."
It's complicated
For their part, Oklahoma Water Resources Board officials said they have two main functions in this situation: to administer water rights and to enforce dam safety regulations. They don't have authority over lake levels.
"The board hasn't made any conclusion about whether or not Coffee dam is impacting the lake levels at Cedar Lake," said Andrew Price, OWRB's assistant general counsel and legislative liaison. "Rather, they're not interfering with their water right."
Even with heavy rain, Price said, the lake is unlikely to fill up because it covers so much of the small watershed.
The OWRB's report includes a letter from 1956 (a year before the lake was built) in which lake engineers told the state that stream inflow would likely not be sufficient to fill Cedar Lake.
The engineers recommended an additional source, and the Western Sportsman Association, acquired one: a permit for a groundwater well specifically to keep the lake topped off.
As with all non-household wells in Oklahoma, the permit holder is required to file an annual report documenting their groundwater usage.
"The last report that we received from them stating that they were using any water was in 2003," Price said. "From conversations with the community, we don't believe that that is currently being used. And that is probably one of the reasons why their lake levels have been declining, is they haven't been artificially recharging it with that permit."
Household wells don't require a permit or a usage report. But they may still contribute to the problem.
According to Price, the OWRB recommends placing groundwater wells no closer than a quarter-mile apart. That means an area the size of Cedar Lake would ideally have no more than 16 wells.
"Within this one square mile, we estimate there are between 250 and 400 domestic groundwater wells," Prince said. "That is an enormous strain on the aquifer."
And OWRB staff suspect that could have major effects on the lake. Price said OWRB hydrologists think the Rush Springs Aquifer and the Marlow Formation are feeding the lake, not the other way around.
"A lot of complaints we have gotten from the community have been concerns about the reduction of the lake level is reducing their groundwater availability, Price said. "When in fact, it's more likely the opposite."
And Cedar Lake has been under "Extreme Drought" — the second-highest drought category — since March. It's been under lesser drought conditions since Christmas.
Climate change researchers have projected shrinking water supply from extreme heat and drought in Oklahoma. The latest National Climate Assessment shows extreme heat is expected to increase. Cedar Lake could be one example of how the state's resources are being affected by the changing climate.
"Whenever we have these instances of drought, the lack of availability of surface water puts a tremendous strain on the state's aquifers and makes that groundwater much more valuable for the people who are using it," Price said.
The independent survey from Johnson-Becker suggests that household well use and recent drought aren't enough to explain the decline in the area's groundwater.
"The aquifer has supplied water to households in the Cedar Lake community for more than 60 years without reports of wells going dry," hydrologist Carl Becker wrote in the report. "Only after the construction of two dams in the upper part of the watershed have residents reported noticeable declines in well yield and water availability."
Legal limitations
No matter what's causing their water shortage, Cedar Lake residents are struggling. And many are asking why the Oklahoma Water Resources Board hasn't taken action on Coffee's unpermitted dams yet.
Kaylee Davis-Maddy is an Oklahoma City-based attorney whose specialties include water law. She said this situation isn't all that uncommon.
"In a perfect world, people would be aware of these things, get the approvals, do all that before they stick a shovel in," Davis-Maddy said. "That doesn't happen, though."
Davis-Maddy is not involved in the conflict between the Western Sportsman Club and the Coffees. But she's been on both sides of similar situations.
When someone has built a dam without the proper permits, she said, the typical course of action is to get the dam permitted after the fact.
"It's a bummer situation," Davis-Maddy said. "Like, we wish it didn't happen that way, but it did… So now it's: How can we correct it in a safe way?"
That's what the Oklahoma Water Resources Board is working to do for the Coffee dams right now. They held a meeting in July to consider a consent agreement with the Coffees to ensure their dams operate safely throughout the permitting process. After deferring a vote at that meeting, the OWRB is scheduled to consider the agreement again next week.
Cedar Lake's water rights are a whole separate tangle.
In Oklahoma, surface water is owned by the state, so the state determines how people can use it via permitting. Groundwater is owned by individual landowners.
In geological reality, groundwater and surface water are often interconnected. But under Oklahoma law?
"Those are completely distinct," Davis-Maddy said. "We do not connect them except in one part of our state. And that is not here." (It's the Arbuckle-Simpson Aquifer in south-central Oklahoma.)
If the Western Sportsman Club weren't able to use their allocation of surface water to top off Cedar Lake, the OWRB could order upstream dams to release water. But they still wouldn't be able to do anything about the waning wells.
"Legally, all of these issues related to 'How are the groundwater wells being affected?' That's not something that the water board can do," Davis-Maddy said.
What's next? 'No secret remedy'
Like many other Cedar Lake residents, Machacek doesn't put much stock in the drought explanation.
"Every old-timer will tell you, 'Don't come up with the excuse about the drought,'" Machacek said. "They said no matter how dry it got, when it would rain, they always had water over the spillway."
But that hasn't happened since the Coffee dams were built, he said.
Price said the OWRB is doing everything it can to make sure the people of Cedar Lake have water to drink. But their domestic groundwater use is "not sustainable long term," he said.
"We've advised that they need to form a rural water district," Price said. "Or they're in a great position in that they have a municipal water system and a rural water district nearby that are willing to extend service to them."
Any of those options would provide a more reliable water supply, he said. They would also likely improve the quality of residents' drinking water.
The OWRB worked with Oklahoma State University and the Department of Environmental Quality to test 86 private wells at Cedar Lake. They found several contaminants at levels that could be unsafe for drinking water.
But connecting to an existing public water system or building a whole new one would be expensive. The OWRB offers several different grants and low- or no-interest loans for projects like that, but the process would take a while and a fair bit of bureaucracy.
"We have no secret remedy," Price said.
Coffee dams are still unpermitted. The OWRB meets to consider a consent order on those dams Tuesday.
In the meantime, many Cedar Lake residents are still going without reliable water. They miss their community's beloved lake.
"We don't care what you do with your dam, with the engineers," Machacek said. "That's our water. Release our water, and then do whatever you want with your dam."
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