DUNCAN — The Public Works office has been keeping busy with several water projects in the city of Duncan, all of which Scott Vaughn, director, said will drastically improve water service in their given areas.

Construction will soon begin on the city’s waterline improvement project that Vaughn said is much overdue.

“Some areas still have three-quarter inch diameter pipes for water mains,” Vaughn said. “So we’re going to begin eliminating those.”

Vaughn said they will be replaced with new six-inch main lines that will drastically improve water volume and pressure in the neighborhoods where it is needed. He also said some of the lines are dead-ends, which cuts down on the consistency of pressure throughout the lines. They will be replacing those with looped lines to help solve that problem.

“The people in these neighborhoods will experience much better service,” Vaughn said.

Some areas included are 12th Street from Cypress to Sycamore, Fourth Street from Chestnut to Pine and from Elder to Peach, Peach Street from 10th to 11th and Third Street from Pine to Spruce.

Vaughn said that there are other areas that need the same improvements, but these different water main projects will have to be prioritized before they decide where to start.

“There are some structural issues, where the lines are, how old the lines are, it’s just a matter of assigning a priority to them,” Vaughn said. “Hopefully, I can do this built on my good engineering judgment.”

Another project already underway, and much more noticeable, is Duncan’s new water tower project on west Plato Road. Vaughn said he is excited to watch this project grow, and said that this is something the city has needed for a long time. He said that a study done 30 years ago said that there would be a demand for more water capacity west of U.S. Highway 81 and north of Elk Avenue, and that a water tower would be needed. In another study done in 2001, it was reaffirmed that a water tower was needed in the northwest part of the city.

“This will dramatically improve the service in that part of the city,” Vaughn said. “It will help with peak demand and with fire flow demands out there.”

Fire flow demands were something that Vaughn said he was particularly interested in meeting, especially after the fires around the city in 2006.

“We were very fortunate the fires weren’t in that area,” Vaughn said, “because we wouldn’t have had the water capacity there to fight those fires.

“This is the most important project right now.”

The water tower will be 135 feet tall, making it Duncan’s tallest building.

“I say building because it will accommodate future inner floor space and office space as well,” Vaughn said, “but not now, that’s a future project.”

The inner-space of the tower will have five floors and close to 10,000 square feet of floor space for future development. Vaughn said eventually there might be a police and fire substation there, a communication center and that the Duncan Public Works department would probably occupy some space there.

Vaughn said the exterior of the water tower would be just as exceptional and was modeled after several different water towers around the Dallas/Ft. Worth area and a water tower in South Lake, Texas.

“The tank is going to have arches with varying colors on it,” Vaughn said. “It’s going to have an aesthetically appealing appearance to it, and I think it’s going to look pretty cool.”

The water tower part of the project is expected to be finished sometime next year, however the floor space portion of the structure isn’t currently a concern, and will be a future project once the functioning portion of the tower is completed.