Results from samples taken Thursday should be available Friday, she said.

In the meantime, Hatfield said the city couldn’t pull water from the river. Water was shut off to the city around 12:30 a.m. Thursday.

UPDATE — Nowata officials have declared a State of Emergency as the city’s drinkable water supply is expected to deplete Thursday afternoon.

Mayor David Lynn said safe tap water likely will run out sometime between 2-4 p.m., and bottled water is being handed out to residents.

The city’s water shut off about 12:30 a.m. while the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality conducts tests for possible contamination in the Verdigris River — Nowata’s water source — caused by a chemical plant explosion in Kansas.

The city had an estimated 10 hours worth of usable water, but Lynn said he’s been informed the outage would last a minimum of two days.

As a result, city officials declared the State of Emergency on Thursday morning in an effort to receive assistance from the state and the Red Cross.

“We’re trying to get all the aid we possibly can to make sure our citizens have safe water,” Lynn said.

Walmart also has donated over a thousand cases of bottled water to the Nowata community.

The results of the testing are expected to be announced Thursday.

The story below originally appeared in Thursday’s edition of the Tulsa World.

NOWATA — The city of Nowata’s water supply was scheduled to be shut off early Thursday due to possible contamination in the Verdigris River caused by a chemical plant explosion in Kansas.

The water was to be shut off around 12:30 a.m. Thursday, said Jeff Grissom, Nowata County emergency manager.

Nowata stopped pulling water from the Verdigris River on Wednesday afternoon as a precaution, said Erin Hatfield, Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality spokeswoman.

The city has about 10 hours worth of usable water in its storage tower, Hatfield said, and once that runs out, emergency management officials and the Oklahoma National Guard will provide bottled water and water tanks as needed.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials were also responding to the situation, Hatfield said.

The river runs through parts of southeastern Kansas and northeastern Oklahoma, through Lake Oologah and into the Arkansas River near Muskogee.

The Department of Environmental Quality is conducting tests to see what chemicals may be contaminating the water, but the contamination would be due to the Airosol chemical plant explosion in Neodesha, Kansas, on Tuesday, Grissom said.

The results of those tests won’t be available until Thursday, Hatfield said.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment issued a do-not-drink order for Wilson County, Kansas, on Tuesday, saying “raw, untreated water is being pumped into the distribution system for fire suppression at the Airosol Company, Inc. plant.”

Officials said in a news release that the Kansas order will remain in effect until “conditions which place the system at risk of contamination are deemed by (Kansas Department of Health and Environment) officials to be adequately resolved.”

The City of Coffeyville, Kansas, declared a Stage 3 Water Emergency effective at 8 p.m. Wednesday.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback issued a disaster declaration after the explosion, The Associated Press reported.

The declaration, announced Wednesday, allows the Kansas National Guard to respond, according to the AP.

To prevent contamination from substances used to fight the fire caused by the explosion, public water systems have been urged to close water intakes on the Verdigris River downstream from the plant.

The blast sent one employee to a hospital with burns that weren’t considered life-threatening, The Associated Press has reported.

The plant manufactures and packages aerosol, liquid and other specialty chemicals.

Market conditions account for at least 41 percent of wastewater disposal cutbacks from oil and gas production in a nearly two-year span, with regulatory actions comprising the rest, according to an ongoing study by an Oklahoma Geological Survey scientist.

The combination of the two factors has forced the industry to look elsewhere for more efficient fossil fuel operations, with the oil bust and regulatory cap limiting production in a 15,000-square-mile area rocked by induced seismicity.

Industry experts point to the “SCOOP” and “STACK” regions as the next development boom, with billions of dollars in the past couple of years poured into acquiring rights by a handful of companies. Those experts believe the state’s seismicity woes won’t tag along because of geographical differences in the producing formations, specifically minimal water coming up with oil and natural gas deposits.

Wastewater disposal volumes into the Arbuckle — the state’s deepest geologic formation — are a crucial component to evaluate because scientists point to it as the culprit behind Oklahoma’s seismic struggles.

Tim Baker, director of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission’s Oil and Gas Division, said he isn’t aware of any permit applications for Arbuckle wells in the SCOOP and STACK plays because they are “much too expensive and unnecessary” for operations in those producing formations.

“We’re monitoring those developments, and we aren’t looking at any restrictions at this point in time,” Baker said.

The market-regulatory study

OGS hydrogeologist Kyle Murray recently told the Tulsa World that economic trends likely contributed to more than 41 percent to the decline of saltwater disposal volumes in the earthquake area of interest, pointing to the oil bust as the catalyst.

Oil prices plummeted seven months consecutively by more than $50 a barrel, from a high above $100 a barrel in June 2014 down to less than $50 a barrel in January 2015. A downward trend continued into 2016.

“I think if the (Oklahoma Corporation Commission) hadn’t done anything, the (disposal) volumes would have declined regardless,” Murray said.

The data cover October 2014 through August. The study is underwritten by a portion of Gov. Mary Fallin’s emergency cash infusion in January of nearly $1.4 million to help address induced seismicity.

The study is important because the state’s man-made earthquakes are tied to disposal well operators injecting tremendous volumes of wastewater into the Arbuckle, mostly from oil and gas activities in the Mississippi Lime play. The Arbuckle contacts and is in hydraulic communication with the state’s “basement” layer of crystalline rock. The basement contains faults that are critically stressed and optimally aligned for quakes.

Murray said that if the state is serious about managing induced seismicity, regulators must be plugged into market conditions and how industry reacts.

“I think they have to be prepared to act in the future and respond to not just earthquakes but to the price of oil and activity in terms of well drilling completion and projection,” Murray said of regulators. “They have to be nimble, able to follow the trends in the industry and anticipate where those disposal volumes may be able to creep up.”

That concept is a “common topic” at the Corporation Commission, Baker said, particularly discussing how the agency might respond to a dramatic increase in the price of oil.

The agency also is investigating opportunities for real-time data reporting, he said.

Oklahoma’s oil prospects

Industry experts tab the future of fossil fuel production in Oklahoma as in the SCOOP (South-Central Oklahoma Oil Province) and STACK (Sooner Trend Anadarko Canadian Kingfisher). The two shale plays predominantly stretch across several counties west and south of Oklahoma City.

The Mississippi Lime play, responsible for the vast amounts of wastewater linked to man-made quakes, generally is to the north and east of the upper reaches of the SCOOP and STACK.

Chad Warmington, president of the Oklahoma Oil and Gas Association, called the SCOOP and STACK “world-class reservoirs” that weren’t discovered until about five years ago.

Warmington said four companies have invested $3.5 billion in the past two years simply obtaining acreage and rights to drill in the SCOOP and STACK. Those companies are Devon Energy, Newfield Exploration, Cimarex Energy and Marathon Oil, he said.

“They’ve got decades worth of production that they can get to,” Warmington said. “How fast they get to it is dependent on market price.”

The volumes produced water from the SCOOP and the STACK are “miniscule” compared to the Mississippi Lime play, Warmington said. So much so, he said, operators typically don’t use the Arbuckle to dispose of wastewater in those areas because they don’t need that formation’s huge porous capacity.

Another benefit, the produced water is less salty than the Mississippi Lime play, Warmington said. That means companies can reuse the wastewater in fracking and completion of wells to cut down on the need to purchase surface or stream water for those jobs, he said.

“That’s a really exciting play for Oklahoma, but for that I think we would be in some pretty significantly dire economic consequences,” Warmington said.

Kim Hatfield, chairman of the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association induced-seismicity work group, highlighted the SCOOP and STACK’s “superior economics.”

That has allowed the industry to “maintain a fairly high level of production” during depressed market prices while still being able to reduce wastewater volumes that has significantly reduced the frequency of quakes, Hatfield said.

“So the level of activity hasn’t suffered nearly as much as it has in some areas of other states,” he said.

On a list to 10 with the highest priority being a No. 1, Hatfield described the Mississippi Lime play as a No. 3 prior to quake-related restrictions. Now it’s an 8, 9 or 10, he said.

Hatfield said oil companies are making decisions each day on where to invest in infrastructure, suggesting Texas, Louisiana, Colorado, North Dakota and Wyoming may be or become better options than Oklahoma. No doubt the state’s oil industry has been hurt, he said, the question now is, “How much incremental pain do you want to inflict?”

Hatfield suggested further reductions may harm industry and not yield a seismicity-related benefit. He referenced massive earthquakes in the past couple of weeks in Argentina, Japan and New Zealand where “no disposal wells are in sight.”

“Sometimes the Earth just moves,” Hatfield said. “We have normally occurring events here. Sometimes it just happens, and it’s not something that we have triggered or can do anything about.”