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Lucky stars
A former Hollywood hangout now caters to underprivileged kids and gets some major luck while
upgrading water systems.
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When Cresta Verde Golf Club in Corona, Calif., was founded in 1927, golf course superintendents were still called greenkeepers. The course architect was Hollywood leading man Randolph Scott, star of numerous films, including “The Last of the Mohicans” (1936) and “Go West Young Man” (1936). Its clientele was a privileged group of actors and industrialists with the rare equipment for and knowledge of golf. Money and water weren’t big deals.
Times have changed. You won’t find movie stars in the fairways of Cresta Verde these days. The course is now in the middle of a real estate development. Most of the regular golfers are hard-working jocks with blue collar jobs or retired. And the course is now host to a program for at-risk youth, called the “Get a Grip Foundation” (www.getagripfoundation.com), which teaches and encourages children in the fundamentals of golf, life skills and education.
Recently, the course took the big step of converting to a modern irrigation system and recycled water from the nearby Corona Water District plant. With some hard work — and maybe a little luck from the stars — the course now has a high-tech irrigation system and better turf conditions.
Ready for reclaimed water
In April 2005, co-author of this article Kevin Neal, CGCS, regional superintendent for ValleyCrest Golf Course Maintenance, was introduced to Jay Miller, owner of Cresta Verde GC, and handed the responsibility of providing improved playing conditions for the loyal patrons.
The first step Neal took was to draw a water sample from the off-site well that provided irrigation for the course. The sample came back labeled “unsuitable for irrigation of turfgrasses” because of extremely elevated electrical conductivity and soluble salts. Along with the water quality problem, the delivery system was an antiquated quick coupler system with two fixed-speed vertical turbine pumps.
It was at this moment that the first in a series of fortunate developments occurred. The City of Corona Department of Water and Power was actively seeking sites to use reclaimed water and approached Miller with the offer to sell the golf course its reclaimed water. Miller asked Neal and ValleyCrest to look into the feasibility of this and determine if this source would be economically and agronomically viable.
ValleyCrest pulled together a team to research this proposition. Included were Ted Horton, CGCS, ValleyCrest consulting superintendent who was involved in the Pebble Beach conversion; Mike Huck, an independent irrigation consultant specializing in effluent water quality assessment and a former USGA Green Section agronomist who regularly works with ValleyCrest to support customers; Todd Shank, the superintendent at Cresta Verde and the other co-author of this article; and Neal, regional golf course superintendent.
After touring the reclaimed water facility, meeting with city of Corona officials and performing water quality testing on the reclaimed water, the team put together a plan with several options for Miller. Included were scenarios for using reclaimed water with the current quick coupler irrigation system; upgrading the irrigation system to an automated version with reclaimed water; and maintaining status quo and attempting to balance the negative effects of the well water on the turfgrass health.
We recommended to Miller that he pursue the reclaimed water option. As Huck noted, there is often a concern when you retrofit to recycled water that there will be a reduction of water quality, but in this case that was not true. The City of Corona recycled water is a high quality product with the total dissolved salts, electrical conductivity, nitrate nitrogen and adjusted sodium adsorption ratio each at levels that were approximately 50 percent of the irrigation well. The reclaimed water would indeed make Shank’s job of managing the greens through the summer heat a bit easier.
Hello, Toro
While Miller and the team wrestled with the costs associated with each scenario, the next fortunate development occurred. The Golf Industry Show 2006 arrived in Atlanta, and all parties were attending and touring the floor. The group was invited into a discussion with The Toro Co. regarding a possible location for a test site for the company’s new Golf Decoder System, a product Toro was developing for use in the United States.
Cresta Verde GC was a natural fit, with its location a mere 12 miles away from the Toro Irrigation Division headquarters in Riverside, Calif.
Upon the conclusion of the GIS, all parties met in Corona, and an agreement was put together that would end with the golf course converting from a quick coupler system to a fully automated SitePro for Golf Decoder System with all new Toro 830 series sprinklers in the field. Miller’s only request was that the golf course be kept open for play during the installation. Phase one of the project concluded with Huck and Neal working out hydraulic plans, routing flow charts and mapping out mainline isolation valves, a mere 12 months after the initial idea was formed.
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The second phase was organizing the installation of all hardware in the field. The first hurdle was to provide isolation for the mainline so water could be shut off in selected areas. Due to the age of the property, mainline isolation valves were nonexistent or had been buried and lost for decades. For cost efficiency’s sake, the course was divided into three sections, and seven gate valves were installed. This isolated six holes at a time and allowed for 12 holes to have water during construction.
The plan was to have one hole closed at a time with the water off during the week in that section. By Friday the water would be turned back on, leaks would be fixed and then irrigation would resume in those closed areas all weekend. The same process would then resume the following week for the next hole.
This process took approximately two months. The crew worked some extremely long hours due to triple-digit temperatures in Southern California during June and July. A typical work day began at 7 a.m. and lasted until 7 p.m. for the crew of 13 workers in 100 degree-plus temperatures.
Several portions of the installation process were drawn out due to gas line crossing regulations, city permitting and the use of specialized equipment. A contractor replaced all quick couplers with swing joints and sprinklers. Next, wire was pulled throughout the property to provide communication and power for all the decoders and sprinkler heads. This process proved to be extremely time-consuming when going through hard native soils.
Approximately 160 decoders were installed in valve boxes all along the communication lines, along with 575 sprinkler heads. Two types of sprinkler heads from Toro, the 800S series full-circle head and 855S series part-circle head, were used. The part-circle heads played a significant role since only a few heads were actually repositioned in order to continue using the existing lateral lines. The 855S part-circle heads adjusted to all directions of arc, trajectory and pressure variances to keep irrigation water from over-spraying into homeowners’ yards.
Cross the road
Another challenge came with the crossing of four city streets. We elected to directionally bore underneath them.
This is the type of work that could be completed in a week, but the permit process with the city made the work almost unbearable.
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Once the communication wires and decoders were installed and completely connected with the central computer, an address had to be assigned to every sprinkler. This was done by entering decoder numbers that represented an address and provided each sprinkler an identification number. Then, station numbers and programs were assigned to their respective locations. Each sprinkler was then tested with a hand-held radio to ensure proper communication status.
Two permits were required — one for the potholing to locate all utilities in the boring path and the second for the actual boring process. Shank spent nearly 16 hours at City Hall and countless hours trying to prepare correct documentation to obtain the permits from the city. The entire street crossing process took nearly a month and a half and was extremely expensive, but all other options were considered and exhausted.
As the irrigation installation was nearing completion, problems started with the only water source, an off-site well. This was a large scare because of extreme heat and the already limited watering schedule Cresta Verde was enduring throughout the installation. At one point the well was completely dead, and water from the city fire hydrants had to be pumped into the lakes just to water the greens.
It was during this nerve-wracking time that fortune smiled again. The City of Corona Water Department took it upon itself to bring the reclaimed water mainline directly up the street where the club’s well pumps were located. The 8-inch line ran within 10 yards of what would have been the point of connection if the decision to make the switch from well water to reclaimed water were to be made.
This was too good of a deal to pass on and Miller made the decision to go ahead with the connection to the effluent water source provided by the city. The connection process took two weeks, and during this time there was no water for tees, fairways or roughs. A million gallons of potable water in the irrigation lake had to last the duration of the connection process. This may sound like a lot of water, but it goes quickly in the middle of summer.
Under pressure
The final hurdle of this entire project was to obtain the effluent water permit from the city.
It took almost two weeks to meet all the requirements needed, and several tests had to be completed before the water could even be turned on.
The plan was to connect the city effluent line directly into Cresta Verde’s irrigation mainline. The course could operate the irrigation system on the city water pressure, eliminating the electrical cost for operating the pump station.
The main concern was to protect the integrity of the old mainlines. The static pressure of 135 psi needed to be maintained to avoid severe problems with the system. Two Cla-Val valves and a high pressure discharge were installed to maintain the pressure. Once the actual plumbing was completed, there were several tests to run. A shut-down test on both the irrigation system and the domestic source to the property confirmed there were no other water connections to the irrigation system and that the domestic source and the irrigation system shared no connections that could contaminate the domestic source.
Each test required pressure gauges, set time limits and visual inspections for compliance. Every visible, aboveground component of the irrigation system had to be tagged and painted purple. Every sprinkler head, quick coupler, valve box and pump station had to be painted purple. Signage at every entrance and exit to the property also had to be marked and labeled for all to see.
The city was astonished at how fast the golf course complied with its regulations and said that the course was the fastest connection to effluent water they had ever had. Shank joked, “Like I have a lot of choice in the matter — I have no water and my golf course is slowly dying. What would you do?”
Leo Feser Award candidate This article is eligible for the 2007 Leo Feser Award, presented annually since 1977 to the author of the best superintendent-written article published in Golf Course Management magazine during the previous year. Superintendents receive a $300 stipend for articles. Feser Award winners receive an all-expenses-paid trip to the Golf Industry Show, where they are recognized. They also have their names engraved on a plaque permanently displayed at GCSAA headquarters. |
The entire installation process from start to finish took just under eight months. In retrospect, we learned many valuable lessons and called upon many resources including the ValleyCrest support system, industry partners and the local Corona Water Department.
Along with all the hard work of everyone involved, it was nice to have a little luck on our side with the availability of reclaimed water right when the well pump went down.
A future review of the results will show a consistently irrigated golf course resulting in better turf conditions for the golfers. The financial savings that were created by tapping into the partnerships will provide a benefit to the kids of the Get a Grip Foundation, and converting from ground water to reclaimed water will have a positive impact on the environment.
Shank sums up the results by saying, “Being able to work with all these different parties and apply communication skills that will forever improve my career are things I will reflect on for years to come.”
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