A 4" line had blown out on hole 6, one of the flattest holes of course, making a temporary pond in the fairway that Andy and his help had fun pumping and squeegeing up. What first appeared like a small fix...turned into another massive trench, this one fortunately turned out to be only 24' long. What they found was just another section of 25 year old pipe that apparently decided today was going to be the end of it's lifespan....
The silver lining here is that we took the opportunity, since the mainline was already dug up, to add an isolation valve to the new pipe when it was installed. For whatever reason, this irrigation system (installed in 1985 or 1986, I think) was put together without any gate valves anywhere on the system. Almost every golf course irrigation system installed in the last 20 years utilizes these valves in order to close off a section of mainline in the event of a break, allowing the rest of the system to be left pressurized and usable while only one small section of pipe is closed off so it can be worked on. Here at GFCC, when we have an irrigation break, the pumpstation and the irrigation on the entire course must be turned off! This is going to bite us in the rear one day when we have a major pipe break that takes days to fix during a streak of 100 degree days in July.....knock on wood.
We are going to make a habit of adding these isolation valves everytime we have to do a mainline fix, and hopefully before too long we'll actually be able to keep some parts of the irrigation system operational next time we have to fix a break. With the addition of this new valve, we now have a grand total of 2 on the entire course. Somewhere around 15-20 would be a more ideal number.....but we are slowly trying to bring this system into the 21st century.
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| Prepping to put the new section of pipe in |
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| Andy and Blake quite stoked to have the pipe back together and a new gate valve insalled! |
Sam...I was on the crew out there for a few years. To my knowledge there are some isolation valves there but we could never find them. They had grown over and/or never had boxes on them. We attempted to track a few down here and there with little success. Good luck with the irrigation. Nate @ Dakota Equipment
ReplyDeleteNate - We actually did find one by accident a few weeks ago, had to dig up and fix a small leak on the mainline between 1 and 10, and low and behold the leak was coming from a valve! That was a nice surprise. So that, and the one we just installed, is all we've got so far. Let me know if you have any other ideas of where to look.....
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