Lake Altus-Lugert holds more than irrigation water. Beneath it lies part of the story of a Southwest Oklahoma town, a devastating tornado and decades of effort to make agriculture more dependable in country where water has never been guaranteed. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken traces the story from Austrian immigrant Frank Lugert and the community he helped build after the 1901 land opening to the tornado that devastated the town in 1912. The story then shifts to Altus and the effort to capture water from the North Fork of the Red River. Early dams and pipelines eventually gave way to the federal W.C. Austin irrigation project, creating a system that could serve roughly 48,000 acres of farmland while also providing municipal water, flood-control benefits, wildlife habitat and recreation. The lake’s dramatic fall during the drought of the early 2010s — followed by its recovery when rain returned — makes Altus-Lugert a continuing measure of just how important water is to Southwest Oklahoma.