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Rain, rain go away
Southern California courses take a winter beating from Mother Nature.
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January hit California with a vengeance, dumping record-breaking amounts of precipitation across the state and wreaking havoc on hundreds of golf courses -- particularly those in Southern California.
"We just got bombarded with rain," says Brenda Warner, executive director of the San Diego GCSA. "Some of the courses were closed for over a month due to water, and there were mudslides in some of the areas where we had the fires in 2003. Mostly, there were a lot of downed trees, water-logged and washed out bunkers. The courses that are built in the path of dry riverbeds became rivers. We haven't seen this kind of damage since the early 90's. Everything came to a screeching halt."
Things are returning to normal now, however, as superintendents mop up the mess under sunny skies and pleasant seasonal temperatures. At Bonita (Calif.) Golf Club, it was the misfortune of being in the path of runoff from a road construction project, according to CGCS Bob Scribner.
"They're doing construction work on Hwy. 125, and the water ran through the fresh tractor work and washed silt down three of our fairways," the 28-year GCSAA member says. "We had anywhere from three-quarters of an inch to three inches of silt in places. It took us about two weeks to skim it off with a tractor."
Surrounding development was just one factor that impacted La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, Calif., according to superintendent Steve Auckland, an 18-year member of the association. "We had four inches of rain in three days, so there was just no place for the water to go," he says. "There's a lot of new development north of us that has turned what used to be grass into concrete and asphalt. To make matters worse, the rain hit right before high tide, so the water couldn't run off."
La Costa was closed for two days due to flooding. Six bridges were affected, including two that were completely washed out.
"Other than that, we had a lot of debris on the course that took us about three days to clean up," Auckland says.
At Barona Creek Golf Club northeast of San Diego, what could have been a real nightmare was mitigated by the extensive erosion control measures that were put into place after the fires of 2003.
"After the fires, we made the decision to invest a chunk of money in erosion control because we were worried about this very scenario," says CGCS Sandy Clark, a 14-year member of GCSAA. "In 2004, we couldn't tell if it was a good move because we didn't get that much rain. Now, we know it works and it works very well. For the most part, all the water moved where we wanted it to move and it moved at the speed we wanted it to move."
That was due primarily to containment basins that are situated throughout the property to help contain and control excess rainfall. Those restoration efforts not only saved Barona Creek plenty of headaches this winter, they also resulted in Clark being honored with the 2004 Environmental Leaders in Golf Award in the national resort category. The award is sponsored by GCSAA and Golf Digest .
Barona Creek didn't completely avoid Mother Nature's wraith, however. "Our biggest headache was cleaning out the 102 bunkers we have on this property," Clark says. "It took an incredible amount of man hours to get them back in shape, but that was really the only challenge we encountered due to the rain, which was double of what I've ever seen in this area."
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