Lake Overholser is a reservoir within the city limits of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Lake Overholser is formed by Overholser Dam on the North Canadian River in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. The lake is west of Bethany and from Yukon. Lake Overholser is named after Ed Overholser who was the 16th Mayor of the City of Oklahoma City.
The lake was originally intended to assure an adequate supply of municipal water, since the city depended primarily on the North Canadian River as a source, supplemented by private wells. The need for flood control capability became obvious when the river flooded in 1923. It breached the Lake Overholser Dam and inundated much of the city.
Description
Lake
The lake covers approximately 1,500 acres (6 km<sup>2</sup>) and was constructed in 1919 to provide water to a treatment plant. According to USGS, its capacity is The average depth is and the maximum depth is only . The dam is built of reinforced poured concrete.
The dam has four distinct sections of buttressed spillways and a solid spillway. A concrete walkway extends across the dam over the buttresses until it comes to the larger spillway, where it is carried by a Pratt through truss.
Later, the paper reported that it was not the dam that had failed, but the embankment (levee) at the west end of the dam that had given way after being battered by flood waters that had built up behind the dam. Within thirty minutes, the initial rush of water had raised the downstream river level by . The river held at that level for two hours, but by then the level at the east end of the dam failed, sending the downstream river level higher in a matter of minutes.