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Divided, they build
Once inundated by the flood of the century, a Minnesota golf course embraces an unusual solution.
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A movie about the restructured Valley Golf Course in East Grand Forks, Minn., might be titled “A Dike Runs Through It.” The theme song could be “Over the Levee and Through the Woods.”
Located along the banks of the often volatile Red River of the North, a large dike now does actually run through the golf course. On two holes, you either tee off from the top of that massive levee or you play over it. On another, you play alongside it.
Interesting? For sure. But there’s more. Nine golf holes have been abandoned, just left to return to whatever nature deems. A completely new nine has been constructed and put into play on an adjacent site that has several man-made lakes and provides some 200 upscale building lots.
How all of this has come about — and why — is a story that began in April 1997 when the north-flowing river topped its banks in what historians say (and U.S. Weather Service records prove) was the “flood of the century.”
That event has been like a stopgap in time — it changed everything. Residents now refer to the timing of all events as either “pre-flood” or “post-flood.” Between East Grand Forks and Grand Forks, its larger North Dakota counterpart on the other side of the Red River (where several downtown buildings burned out of control when firefighters couldn’t get to them because of the 4-foot-deep water in the streets), almost 60,000 people were forced to evacuate their homes.
As the top news story of the time, the ugly combination of flood and fire was viewed on television by the entire country for several days. President Clinton and a host of other government officials visited the communities to offer their encouragement and help in recovery.
Of the 9,000 East Grand Forks residents evacuated, some 1,500 made that departure permanent. With their homes destroyed, they just moved on. The flooding in East Grand Forks was so pervasive that only eight houses escaped some level of flooding. In all, more than 460 homes were damaged to the extent that they had to be razed. About 30 business properties met the same fate. At the time, Mayor Lynn Stauss quipped that the often-used EGF acronym for the city’s name really stood for “everyone got flooded.”
But a dynamic rebuilding effort has been under way for the past several years, and new residents are moving in by the hundreds. The community is coming back stronger than ever. The main feature of this resurrection, which has become the federal government’s model for disaster recovery, is a $410 million flood-protection project. Built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the giant ring dikes that will soon completely encircle both Grand Forks and East Grand Forks on their separate sides of the river are designed to protect the two communities from up to a 500-year frequency flood.
Levee alignment
But not everything has fallen into place without a problem. For Valley GC, the preliminary alignment for the protective levee was a real issue. With only one of the 18 holes to be completely on the dry side of the structure, the golf course was to be acquired as a part of the flood control project. As a part of that process, the appraised value of course, which amounted to the cost of replacing it, was set at $2.25 million. But instead of taking the payoff and going out to start all over at some other site, the Valley membership thought there had to be another solution.
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“Having the entire golf course be taken for the project was unacceptable to the membership,” according to Greg Boppre, an engineer with the local Floan Sanders engineering firm and a member of the board of directors of Valley GC. “That was when HDR was brought in to study possible alternatives.”
A large national architecture and engineering firm, HDR assigned senior landscape architect Martin Krueger from its Dallas office, along with staff from the company’s Thief River Falls, Minn., and Minneapolis satellite offices, to do the study.
“The Corps’ preliminary levee alignment,” Krueger notes, “ran right through the middle of the existing golf course and would have destroyed several holes. Our job was to determine the best location for the levee while minimizing its impact on playability of the course and on neighboring residential properties.”
From his experience with various aspects of planning and design of more than 50 golf courses throughout the United States and in 12 foreign countries, Krueger was able to anticipate how varying alignments would affect the course. Krueger and the HDR engineers developed three alternatives for levee alignments and golf course routings based on the hydraulic models, the load-bearing capacities of the existing soil and cost estimates for the earthwork that would be required for the construction of the levees.
The first two alternatives focused on minimizing damage from the levee while keeping the course in its existing location. The third involved a proposal to use additional off-site land that had been acquired as a part of the flood-control project to serve as a “borrow pit” for levee construction.
Best alternative
This plan called for abandoning nine of the most flood-prone holes on the existing course, renumbering the remaining holes and creating a “new nine” on the adjacent 160-acre borrow pit site.
“We looked into how we could make a connection from the existing course to the new piece of property,” Krueger says. “We also conducted extensive cost-modeling studies for moving and reconstructing putting greens, changing fairways and making other necessary revisions, including how the levee construction activity would impact the course’s revenue. Based on the analysis, this third alternative provided the best combination of cost-effective flood control and minimal disruption to ongoing golf course operations.”
With the Corps, the city and golf club membership in agreement, the plan went forward. Nine of the course’s 18 holes, those most susceptible to flooding, were abandoned. Nine were saved. The new nine, constructed on the adjacent land, was financed by the $2.25 million mitigation payment to the golf course for damages caused by the levee project.
With a striking difference between the two nine-hole layouts, blending the new with the old hasn’t exactly been a seamless marriage. One features fairways and greens that were carved out of an area of thousands of large elm, cottonwood and oak trees. In addition to their beauty, the trees provide significant protection from the elements. By contrast, the new nine has a St. Andrews-like links terrain and is built around several small, man-made lakes.
After playing through the protected, heavily wooded environment of the original nine, golfers now cross a road to the rolling new layout, which by comparison, is void of any large trees and features the man-made lakes along with a budding residential development. With its contrasting looks and features, Valley GC stockholder-members, who first began playing the new nine last August, are predicting that the course will soon become the feature layout of the area.
Among the many boosters is Boppre. “The people just love the new nine; the stockholders are really happy with it,” he says. “It will have the links look until the trees mature. Trees were the real beauty of the golf course before the flood changed everything. Now we have the big, mature trees on the original nine and will have the links look on the new nine for a few years until the young trees that have been replanted there mature.”
A flooded history
Through the years, member-owned Valley GC has been subjected to flood damage on a nearly regular basis. But other than major-event floodings such as the one that inundated the entire town in 1997, spring flooding usually is not a problem because the grass on the fairways and greens is still dormant when the river spills its banks. In a normal year, there wasn’t much more to getting the course back into top shape in the spring than to pick up debris left behind.
However, a big summer rain event can be disastrous. Flooding then kills the grass. When that occurs, reseeding’s cost and disruption causes large revenue losses. Although not a regular occurrence, summer flooding has happened often enough to keep the course from reaping the rewards that would allow it to take that next step toward excellence. With the restructured course now, much of that problem should be avoided.
Community volunteers, who formed the Valley Golf organization in 1970, built the original nine holes. The first president of the group, Gary Sanders, a civil engineer and avid golfer, personally designed the course on river land that had once been a hog farm and, among others things, the depository for 50 or more junked cars. When it was done using the site as a borrow pit for material to elevate the city’s cemetery, the city turned the land over to the golf course group on a no-cost, long-term lease.
After using $20,000 of its $65,000 budget to purchase additional land from an area farmer (bringing the site to 91 acres), not much was available for construction. The biggest expense was the clearing that had to be done to create the fairways through the heavily wooded area. The greens were built by club members from a mixture of sand, peat and black dirt. A few members personally put in a water system. When the course opened for play in the summer of 1972, the golf car shed doubled as the pro shop.
As the Valley Golf organization emerged from its meager beginning and was able to put a few bucks aside, a second nine was added (following, of all things, an earlier flood that destroyed six homes in an adjacent area). After acquiring the property for the purpose of clearing those homes out of the flood plain, the city gave the land to the golf course on another long-term lease. The club then purchased additional farmland at the opposite end of the course and embarked on the expansion to 18 holes. The second nine opened in 1985. With a new clubhouse that opened in 1987 and other improvements that were regularly put into place, the course was doing well despite its battles with floods.
Excavated material stockpiled
The idea of constructing a new nine on the adjacent land came about as an alternative to the plan that would have removed about 4 feet of dirt from the quarter-section of farmland to provide material for the final segment of levee construction. Instead, Krueger worked with project managers from the Corps to gather the needed material by digging a few man-made lakes. The 170,000 cubic yards of material removed to create the lakes was then stockpiled for the final phase of levee construction.
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Golf course contractor United Golf of Tulsa, Okla., the successful bidder for construction of the course, started moving dirt in the summer of 2003. “It was tough that first summer because the material was wet when you went down just a few feet,” says Mike Webb, project manager and an owner of the firm. “There was actually water coming out of the ground during part of the work.
“Our goal was to go up there and move all the dirt the first year; get the course rough-shaped, top-soiled and the drainage system formed. Then go back the next spring to complete the fine-shaping and build all the greens, bunkers and put in the irrigation system. It went really well. Dakota Peat & Equipment was a great help. Not only did they help in getting the sand and doing the blending for the greens, but they also let us use a machine to spread the sand in the traps. They were always there when I needed something.”
The water source for the irrigation system is the river. Floan Sanders engineering firm worked with HDR irrigation consultant Terry Little to design a system that draws water from the river and transfers it to an existing pond on the original nine. In the plan, a new transfer pipe crosses the old course to a lake on the new course where the irrigation well is located. All of the lakes are interconnected by a series of buried pipes. So when the irrigation system is activated, it draws down from all the lakes, making displacement of water look less severe than if it were all taken from one lake.
A county ditch also has been diverted to direct local drainage into the lakes, which will serve as storm-retention ponds for drainage inside the levee system during a flood. “We can store stormwater in the golf course lakes as part of the city’s overall stormwater conveyance system,” Krueger says of the more than 60-million-gallon storage capacity. “And in storm conditions, the lakes will be connected to a pump station that can transfer the water to the other side of the levee.”
The new nine holes and lakes take up about 60 acres of the parcel. The remaining 100 or so acres are in the city’s new Waters Edge residential subdivision.
Slice controlled
Krueger’s golf course design takes into account the fact that more than 95 percent of golfers are right-handed and that the majority of them slice the ball when they hit it.
“We’ve arranged the new holes so that most errant shots will land on another hole rather than on someone’s home or in their backyard,” Krueger says.
Dakota Peat & Equipment was instrumental in development of the new holes. Besides providing the peat, the company’s involvement included working with Krueger in selecting a sand source for the greens that exceeded all USGA specifications. Sister company Dakota Analytical, one of only a few laboratories in the country with the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA), provided testing for the 90-10 putting greens mix materials, and Dakota Blending, another sister company, did the blending. Dakota Peat & Equipment also provided equipment used to deliver sand for the bunkers.
Good weather allowed almost all of the work in constructing the levee through the course to be completed in fall of 2005. The completion of the irrigation installation and the grow-in were uneventful, and the entire course was playable for the 2006 season, thanks to some strategic placement of golf car paths that allowed the golfers to play around the newly seeded levee.
“We only have about six months to make our money, so we can’t afford to shut down for a month or two while the grass grows in,” says Scott Eggers, course superintendent and general manager. “If we did, it would really hurt our budget.”
But what really hurt was another flood last spring — a 47-footer that put three holes under water, deposited quite a bit of silt and set the golf season back about five weeks.
Nevertheless, the club’s golfers enjoyed the somewhat shortened season and the “added character” the levee gives the course, says Eggers, a two-year GCSAA member. The clubhouse has been moved to higher ground, the golf car paths have been hard-surfaced and a new driving range has been completed for the 2007 season.
Eggers and his crew have planted nearly 200 trees already, with 75 to 100 more scheduled to go in this year.
The club’s five-year plan calls for the pushup greens on the original nine holes to be reconstructed to USGA recommendations.
Over the levee
The effect of play over the levee on the hole where it’s a factor won’t be as readily noticeable as it may sound, according to Sanders, who remains a key member of Valley GC. “The design provides a gradual rise of the fairway to the top of the dike height, and the landscape shaping, trees and shrub practices help to minimize it,” he says. “Without those features, which were developed by John Fisher of the Corps of Engineers, you would have a blind hole. The levee is almost 10 feet tall in that area.”
Having the tee box on the top of the levee on the other hole directly affected will only provide for a nice view, Sanders says.
The construction of the new nine holes also provides a significant economic benefit to the community, he notes.
“The planning that was done 30 to 40 years ago did not address expansion of the city into this area and, with the high cost of extending infrastructure, development there wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon without the golf course,” he says. “Now, with city services in place, some 200 lots have been developed. We can’t build near the river any more, so that’s out. This area represents much of what is available now for new upscale housing.”
As last year’s flood proved, much of the course on the “wet side” of the dike will continue to be susceptible to spring flooding, Eggers says, but adds, “The spring floods we can deal with. The summer flooding that would kill us will now be a thing of the past. And with the new nine, all the makings of a dynamic, new golf course are in place.”
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