Courses face Mother Nature’s wrath
Posted on Monday, April 14, 2008
Flooded fairways, submerged cart paths and raging torrents of water have afflicted area golf courses after weeks of relentless rain.
The deluge not only rendered Stonebridge Meadows Golf Club unplayable last Thursday, it rendered the main road approaching the course impassable as a swollen west branch of the White River had overwhelmed its banks.
The overflow spilled into the greenside pond on 18 and turned Stonebrige’s driving range into a flood plain.
“ It was as high as I’ve ever seen it, ” said Lee McBurnett, the course’s superintendent, of the White River. “ The only thing you could see on the driving range were the tops of the flags. ”
McBurnett said the swiftmoving water made traversing much of the course too dangerous. His crew spent 40 man hours on the areas it could reach reshaping and refilling bunkers that rushing waters washed out.
“ With all this rain, we’ve had to do that numerous times, ” he said. “ It’s been a rough spring. My budget is down a little bit because we’re having to watch our money. We’re just not getting the revenue we’d normally be getting at this time.
“ We’ve had so few decent days to play golf this year. Nobody wants to play golf when it’s raining and 50 degrees and you can’t drive off the cart path. You wouldn’t think in a normal year you’d have this much rain, but I figure we’ve had 20 inches since March 1. ”
According to the National Weather Service’s Web site, Northwest Arkansas was inundated with 10 to 15 inches of rain in March. Almost five inches have already fallen this month. Four inches of precipitation is the average amount for April.
“ There’s no way to plan for that, ” McBurnett said. “ No amount of drainage that we would do on the golf course would ever be capable of handling that amount of water. ” The unexpected levels have eaten into McBurnett’s budget. He had to hire a backhoe operator to dig a trench across the fifth fairway that will shunt water from the low area in front of the elevated green. He’s not the only superintendent who’s patience has been tested. Jason Cuddy at Springdale Country Club has watched water run wild over his course. The overflow of the irrigation pond on 14 turned that hole’s fairway and cart path into a river. A similar event happened on the first hole, as the creek by Shady Grove Road spilled over its banks and onto the fairway. He said water from Turner and Powell streets drains through and across the golf course, making the club a watershed area for debris to collect. “ We always joke that anybody who leaves a basketball or a big wheel in a ditch the day before it rains, we inherit it, ” Cuddy said.
Clearing the course of unbidden big wheels, basketballs and other detritus born of relentless rain has kept Cuddy’s seven-man crew busy. The extra work load has deflected man power from other important tasks.
“ The biggest effect is the hindrance in maintenance practices, ” Cuddy said. “ We’re unable to get out on the course and do the things we need to do on a day-today basis. Instead we spend the day cleaning up floods and disasters from the rain. ”
Though the ground is saturated now, most of the moisture will be gone when the arid months of summer arrive. Cuddy and McBurnett wish they could allocate March and April’s rain totals across the entire calendar.
“ By the time July and August gets here, there may be a little benefit to [the rain ], ” Cuddy said. “ Really rainfall is one of those things that you kind of need on a periodic basis. Getting your entire annual rainfall in the first of the year doesn’t do you a whole lot of good in the last of the year. ”
McBurnett said superintendents will be longing for rain during the drought-ridden months of late summer.
“ I guarantee you by July, we’re going to be begging for rain, ” McBurnett said. “ That’s the way it happens. We’ll be begging for it at some point. Getting rain in the spring is good if it would come in smaller increments instead of six inches at a time. ”
Superintendents are constantly contending with the vagaries of weather. McBur nett’s lear ned that he and others of his ilk are often at the mercy of an unpredictable climate, making vigilance their only recourse.
“ I don’t know what the weather is going to do, and the weather man doesn’t know what it’s going to do five days from now, but we’ve got to be ready, ” he said. “ In this business, you have to let Mother Nature dictate what you do. If you try to fight it, Mother Nature will beat you every time. ”
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