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Swells from Iowa’s Cedar River plunged 400 city blocks, 3,900 homes and hundreds of cars in Cedar Rapids deep under water earlier this month.
Heavy rain storms caused the Cedar River to crest June 13 at almost 32 feet, 12 feet higher than the record set in 1929 (CNN.com). During the week following the flood, 5,316 tons of debris was removed from the state’s second largest city. About 425 golf courses in the state were affected, according to Jeff Wendel, executive director of the Iowa Golf Course Superintendent Association and the Iowa Turfgrass Institute.
“If you take into account lost revenue just due to the rain, probably every golf course in the state experienced loss,” Wendel says. “We estimate anywhere from 100 to 150 courses had major damage. During some of the early flooding, we still had pretty cool temps, so grass survived and facilities were able to clean things up and get back.”
Three of four collector wells in the city were disabled, and 29 of 46 vertical wells still aren’t functioning. The city’s water production is running below 75 percent capacity, an increase from less than 25 percent during the days following the flood (Corridorrecovery.org).
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Already some courses have been closed more than 25 days, and still others, such as Jones Park Golf Course, will be closed until next spring – if they reopen at all. Wendel and Bill Dickens, executive director of the Iowa Golf Association, are working to calculate the economic impact of the flood on the state’s golf industry, but Dickens says it’ll be months still before the results are tabulated.
For golf course superintendents affected by the state’s biggest disaster in history, the show must go on. Even as crews rally to repair damaged property and turf, summer temperatures are nearing the 90-degree mark.
Tom Feller, CGCS, fared better than some local facilities at Cedar Rapids Country Club, a private, 18-hole course in the heart of the city. The course has reopened for business, but it’s taken a lot of hard work to get there.
“Basically, we’re on a clean-up mission right now,” Feller says. “We have 18 holes open for play. That was the first priority. Now, we’re just trying to detail it out and get it back to normal by July 4.”
Feller and his crew spent 5.5 hours on each of three heavily silted greens, rinsing them by hand after the water subsided and then reseeding them. The new grass germinated within 18 hours, says Feller, who is currently sodding parts of the fairways and rough that were damaged from brushes during silt removal.
“This is the third time we’ve flooded in my seven years here,” he says. “That’s life in a flood plain. You just go to work and assess what’s going on.”
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There’s been plenty of assessing to do at Jones Park. The course usually comprises about 20 percent of total Cedar Rapids in-season rounds, which total about 113,500. As of now, the course, one of four municipal facilities in the city, is still without an irrigation system, says Jeff Schmidt, CGCS. All but 2 inches of his main pump were submerged. He’s spent the past two weeks in a race against time, working with his crew to salvage as much of the course as possible, but the prognosis isn’t good. Jones Park won’t reopen in 2008, and at this point, Schmidt is struggling to keep the course alive.
Turf can’t survive long under water at temperatures above 80 degrees, Wendel says. Schmidt learned this the hard way. Jones Park is probably the most heavily damaged golf course in Cedar Rapids, though it was designed to fill up with water and drain immediately. While the sheer volume of water at the facility was almost impossible to combat, Schmidt and his crew did everything in their power to prepare.
But despite their efforts, 18 of the 20 greens were submerged entirely. Only nine were saved, and portions are damaged beyond repair. Schmidt hopes to reseed all greens before mid-September.
Schmidt also is superintendent at another city course, Donald K. Gardner Memorial Golf Course. Since June 7, he and his assistant, Chad Bildstien, have focused full-time on Jones Park. Gardner escaped any significant damage, so Schmidt and his crew are logging exhausting 15-hour-plus days of physical labor.
Schmidt and his team went out in two boats to reach the greens as soon as possible before the water receded. At each green, the crew sucked in the surface debris with a hose, slurried the silt and flushed it back out onto the course to let it run off.
Once the water was too shallow to navigate by boat, Schmidt and his crew had to wait until the ground was firm enough to walk on the course without damaging it significantly. Meanwhile, they focused on the clubhouse, still flooded with more than two feet of water, the parking lot and the main cart path until they could address the silt accumulation.
“We tried snow shovels and squeegees where the silt was 1/4-inch thick, but that was difficult because you’d end up with a lot of material on your shovel,” he says. “As the other greens dried, we had as much as 1/2 inch of dried silt on the greens. It looked like the hide of a giraffe. We used a bunker rake to push the material off the green, and it flaked off the green pretty easily because the grass is so short.”
But now that greens have dried, it’s a struggle to keep what little turf remains alive.
“The electrical control components for the irrigation pump are all destroyed,” Schmidt says. “The pump motor needs to be dried out and brought back in before we can rely on that. None of it’s been done yet, so we’re using pumps and hoses from a fire hydrant.”
Still, it’s not quite enough to pump irrigation to the entire course. Schmidt’s taking the recovery process one day at a time, and hopes Jones Park will be able to open nine holes in the spring.
Speaking on behalf of superintendents throughout the state, Wendel has confidence in Schmidt and other golf course caretakers in Cedar Rapids.
“They’re Iowa guys,” he says. “They’ll pull it together.” GCI