GFCC: Hot, Dry, And Frozen

We were finally able to get our pumpstation up and running earlier this week, and it was just in time. April generally brings to mind thoughts of cool and rainy early spring weather, but this week has been anything but that. Since the snow melted about a month ago, we have really only had one precipitation event, and that was about an inch of snow that fell last week. Since then, it has been warm, dry, and extraordinarily windy.

These combination of factors are very difficult on grass plants as they break dormancy and start their spring growth. Turf emerging from winter has a very limited root system with which to take in water, meaning that even the smallest stretch of dry conditions can cause the plant to immediately wilt and die. This week, with daytime temperatures getting close to 80, winds gusting at 40+ mph, and afternoon humidity levels down to nearly 10% (think Arizona desert), keeping the turf alive on our sand based greens and tees was our number one priority.

After hauling around tanks of water last week and over the weekend, and looking at the forecast for a hot and dry week this week, we made the decision on Monday to charge up our irrigation system. Unfortunately however, there is still a lot of frost left in the ground. This made for a very challenging situation putting water in our irrigation pipes, that were surrounded by frozen ground. A major problem was accessing all of the underground valves that were often times still encased in ice.

Solid blocks of ice were a common sight this week inside all of our valve boxes.
In order to combat this, Collin and I hauled nearly 100 buckets of hot water from
the clubhouse to pour in these and melt the ice.

Another issue of course with putting water in pipes surrounded by frozen soil, is that the water inside the pipes will begin to freeze and break the pipes. As evidenced by all of our gopher holes across the course this week, the staff has been busy with shovels digging up cracked valves and leaks as small pockets of water have refroze inside the pipe in areas of deep frost.

A 2" lateral line caused a few problems in the right rough on hole 3

Probably 95% of our mainline runs in the rough, but the one bad mainline
break we had was a 4" main in 6 fairway.

This is just one of many small holes dug across the course this week to fix
broken pipe. In this example on 17, the soil around the pipe was still frozen
solid, so we are just letting the water sit in the hole to thaw it out.

No wonder here why this pipe was broken.

Despite all the issues, the majority of the system did work as we needed it to, allowing us to pump nearly 300,000 gallons of water onto the golf course since Tuesday. If I would have had my preference, we would have waited for another week or so to start putting water back in our irrigation lines, but the weather really forced our hand this week into pushing the limits. We paid the price with a few more instances of broken pipe and valves that we may not have had otherwise, but the risk of losing large areas of turf on our greens or tees made it worth it in the long run.