May 4, 2010

On Sunday afternoon I was on my normal rounds checking the greens and tees, and probing fairways when I found that a pipe had broken to the left of the whites on the 2nd tee. The water was spilling across the cart path and into the rough, and then pushing through the cedars and into the pond before the 18th tee. I quickly drove my cart to the shop and got the gate valve keys and was able to turn the water off before it washed out the cart path and caused more and other damage.

The area was so saturated that I decided to let the area drain out until Monday morning before making repairs. On Monday morning, after 3 hours of careful excavation we located the break on a 6” main. It had split beginning at a joint, and the split extended about four feet down along the pipe. It was a pretty bad leak as far as leaks go. It was also serious – to repair the pipe we had to shut down the water for holes 1, 2, 3, 16, 17, and 18, along with the wedding garden and practice green. Luckily the weather was cloudy and we were able to get along without syringing or watering.

We spent the rest of the day on Monday cutting out the broken section and replacing it. This had to be done surgically and with a lot of patience. With the main ran bundles of irrigation wires that control the sprinkler heads and supply power to the controllers. We had to be very careful not to stretch, nick or cut them.







Tuesday morning, we stabilized the new section of pipe and flushed out the system. Afterwards, we pressurized it to our operating pressure of 120 psi, and checked for any leaks at the couplers. Everything held tight!

As I write this we are filling the hole and flushing out the system once again. Invariably, no matter how careful we are to avoid letting sand and soil enter the irrigation system through breaks such as this, it still gets in and takes a lot of work to flush it out.

Hopefully by this afternoon we will have all of this finished up, and the irrigation system fully functional.