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Golf clubs rebuild in storm's aftermath
3/22/2008 6:29 PM   0 comment(s) on this story E-mail this story to a friend

By MICHAEL PAUL

Staff writer

As fickle as the bounce of a golf ball on a fairway, the storm that roared through the Aiken area March 15 left its mark on some courses but left others undamaged.

The rain washed out bunkers. The wind uprooted trees. Tumbling trees buckled cart paths and punctured greens.

Yet for those visitors who want to golf while they are in the area for the Masters Tournament, the golf courses are expected to be in such good condition that it would be hard to imagine the initial damage the storm caused.

And the damage to parts of courses was severe.

At the Palmetto Golf Club, superintendent Rhett Baker recalled getting a call after the storm had passed.

"My assistant superintendent drove out right before dark and called me and said, 'You don't really want to know what happened.' "

Baker first saw the damage the following Sunday morning.

"I drove around in the dark before the sun came up and thought, 'This is bad.' But then when the sun came up, it was like, 'Oh my, this is comparable to the ice storm (of a few years ago),'" he said. "In that case, everything just dropped straight down. This storm just blew helter-skelter all over the place. We had 16 trees pushed over and uprooted that were on the immediate golf course. One of them landed on the second green. Another 20 trees in the wooded area were also pushed over."

The tree that fell on the second green hit the right corner.

"There were a lot of puncture wounds," Baker said. "We'll be able to fix it without a whole lot of trouble. We'll have to stay off the area for a while as far as play."

The heavy rain also washed out many areas.

"The debris was tremendous over the entire course," he said. "We had 1.1 inches of rain that had to have come in under 10 minutes. I can't imagine what it looked like. Our sandy cart paths were washed out. You couldn't see a lot of grass. All you saw were pine cones and limbs and leaves and sticks."

Despite all that, the course now is playable.

"We finished (on Wednesday) the bunkers that washed out from the rain," he said. "We finished getting debris off the fairways and the greens and the tees (on Tuesday). Now we're working on trees. We're only about one-third of the way through on the trees."

He said his 14-member crew has cleaned up everything as far as the immediate needs for the golfers.

"Now we're taking care of the trees and things on the periphery of the course," he said.

Palmetto is a private course, but it is open to play during the Masters week to golfers who have made reservations.

"We'll be back up to 100 percent," Baker said Wednesday. "If the weather doesn't kill us, then we'll be back, I would expect, by the end of (this) week. Nobody would know (what happened.)"

At the Golf Club of Cedar Creek, the storm knocked down trees.

"We had probably over 70 trees go down on the course itself," said Ty Reed, assistant manager in the pro shop. "It was mainly our front nine that got peppered with a lot of the stuff. On No. 4 to the left of the green, we had about 12 trees go down from one person's yard."

The roots of the upended trees punched through a part of the cart path to the left of the 570-yard second hole and ripped through a part of the cart path at the 397-yard sixth hole.

"We had some irrigation ripped up from the trees being ripped up, as well," Reed said.

The course, which can play to a length of 7,045 yards, is open for play as the cleanup continues.

"We got all the trees cut up and moved, so the whole course is playable," Reed said. "Nothing in particular is blocked off. In the fairway there is still debris. Pine cones, little limbs. As far as (downed) trees on the tee box or greens, there is nothing that anyone would notice.

"We have a lot of volunteers from the community, as well as a lot of extra help coming in from our employee staff. Our maintenance is working overtime. We hope to have it looking good by the Masters."

The Midland Valley Golf Course also suffered tree damage.

"Sunday we only opened nine holes," said Brooks Blackburn, the club pro. "We lost most of our trees on the back nine. We lost about 70 trees. At No. 12, we lost about eight or 10 trees."

But the cleanup proceeded quickly, and all 18 holes were open for play on Monday.

"We still have some debris down and we have to get the trees cleaned up," Blackburn said, "but we are back in full operation. None of the trees hit any of the greens."

The only signs of the storm are off the fairway.

"If they're hitting the ball down the fairway and hitting it up on the green, they would have no idea (there was a storm)," Blackburn said.

The three nine-hole courses at Houndslake Country Club escaped heavy damage.

"We were very fortunate over here," said Rocky Oswald, assistant pro at Houndslake. "We didn't have any significant damage over here. We had some trees, some limbs and some pine cones fall, but nothing really significant."

The courses were open for play the next day.

"We did some cleanup," Oswald said. "We had some limbs come down on certain spots of the golf course. But, overall, it wasn't bad at all."

At Woodside Plantation Country Club, the damage was minimal.

"We actually didn't have that many trees down, surprisingly," said Wes Knuth, an assistant golf pro. "The main effect on the course was that we had tree limbs down and our bunkers got washed out."

Golfers were back on the course the next day.

"It took a while Sunday morning to get the bunkers ready and to get limbs and tree branches removed before we could get players on the golf course," Knuth said. "We were open for business in the morning. We really didn't have that much damage. We got lucky."





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