Courses drying out after heavy rains
Shane O’Neil has seen his share of water-covered fairways. The superintendent of Bella Vista’s Berksdale and Kingswood Golf Courses estimates in the 16 or so years he’s worked for the Property Owners Association he’s seen many major instances when it rained enough to send water spilling over the local creek banks and onto many of the POA’s lush courses.
But last week’s event wasn’t one of them.
“I’ve been here in this area for about 18 years and worked for the POA for about 16,” he said. “I’ve been through about 32 major ones. I wouldn’t consider this one a major one. Not for us.”
O’Neil and his staff surveyed the courses as the creek levels spilled over the banks. After checking courses Wednesday afternoon they took a break before returning that evening to see if the water levels had crested.
“We’ll have to wait for the water to crest, then we’ll come back later this evening and see how much damage has been done,” he said that afternoon.
While O’Neil didn’t expect to find any major damage, he did expect to find a lot of instances where silt and debris would need to be cleaned from the courses.
“We will have silt,” he said, looking out over the Kingswood course next to his shop along Hwy. 71. “You can’t see it from here, but on No. 2 over there in the corner there will be a lot of silt. With it being the first flood of the year it’s kind of cleaning out the creek.”
The silt gets washed onto greens and fairways, making for treacherous walking conditions for the golfers.
“It gets really slick. We’ll have to scrape the silt off to make it playable for people,” he said. “That’ll be our biggest challenge, trying to get that off in a timely fashion. We’ve got to make it safe. It’s all about keeping the golfers safe.”
O’Neil said the rest of the work will consist of “getting logs off of fairways, getting debris out of the fairways, drying out, fixing our bunkers, adding sand to our bunkers, replacing signs, T-posts, yardage markers and sand buckets.”
His early estimate was “about two weeks” for the courses to fully recover and be back to normal, but workers actually had the courses playable three days after the water began subsiding.
“If it’s bad enough we’ll ask for volunteers and they’ll come help,” he said, “but this isn’t one where we’ll need that. It’s just going to take more time for it to dry out than for us to have to clean up.”
“Shane O’Neil, along with his assistant superintendents Wendy Barnes at Berksdale and Marty Faulkinberry at Kingswood, and their entire staff do an outstanding job getting the course cleaned up and ready for play,” said POA Director of Golf Course Maintenance Keith Ihms. “They are always focused on providing the best possible playing conditions as quickly as possible while keeping our staff, members and guests safe.”
O’Neil said there have been instances where he and his crew have had to ask for help from other POA courses, and times where his crew has returned the favor.
“When you have Dogwood, Highlands and Scotsdale … we can rely on them to help,” he said. “When you’ve got five golf courses, those guys do a great job. They support us and we support them. They’ll send people to help if we need it. We’ve got a pretty good core of golf course employees.”
He added that the other courses “have their runoff areas, where they get lots of water, but nothing to this extent. We all get hit by it in some way, but because we’re here in the bottoms it hits us a little harder.”
They get hit, dry out, recover and wait for the next one, knowing it’s not a matter of if, but when.
“I’ve been through backto-back ones, and I think in maybe 2009 we had 20 inches of snow and then we got 11 inches of rain like a week later,” he said.
Ihms said completing the clean up this week is especially challenging since greens aeration began on Berksdale and Kingswood this week.
“Plus there’s more rain coming,” he said.