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Area courses have finished windstorm clean-up

September ‘hurricane’ did heavy damage to area courses

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By Bucky Albers, Contributing Writer Updated 12:34 PM Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Zack Wike, an assistant greens keeper at Moraine Country Club, was giving a couple of friends a tour of the Moraine golf course on that Sunday afternoon in September when the wind started blowing harder than he’d ever experienced.

Huge trees were being uprooted, large limbs were breaking off and falling and leaves seemed to be raining sideways from the sky.

“We just had a few people on the course, so we got them off and closed the course,” he said recently. “As I’m leaving, a big, old oak tree blew over next to the first tee.”

The windstorm of Sunday, Sept. 14, 2008, did not treat the Miami Valley’s heavily wooded golf courses kindly.

Community Golf Course lost about 50 trees. Dayton Country Club lost at least 90; Moraine had about 100 taken out; and 180 trees at NCR Country Club either fell or were damaged so badly that they had to be cut down.

Madden Golf Course lost eight good-sized trees and had another dozen damaged. Sycamore Creek Country Club lost several trees, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The Springboro club was without power for 10 days. Its golf course was closed four days for cleanup.

“We still pulled off a wedding (with the help of a generator) five days into it and had an outing for South Metro Chamber on the weekend,” Sycamore general manager Brad Pollak said. “The staff did a fabulous job.”

Six months later, one can play a round of golf on most of the courses without noticing that anything happened.

Having cleaned up the messes, the crews are readying the turfgrass for the 2009 season.

Dennis Cox, course superintendent at Dayton Country Club, has been on the staff for 36 years and has seen some tornadoes go through.

“In some ways this was worse because it just wasn’t one swath,” Cox said. “This was 50-to-70 mile-an-hour wind. I can’t imagine what 100 mile-an-hour wind would be like.”

Cox’s crew did most of the cleanup at DCC without hiring professional tree trimmers.

“I put in about 70 hours that first week,” Cox said. “Fortunately, we had an excellent crew. We had 12 or 13. There was so much debris that had to be hand raked.

“We were able to purchase a chipper,” Cox added. “If it hadn’t been for that chipper, we’d still be cleaning up. It saved us the trouble of hauling the limbs away.”

Wike said Moraine’s crew also benefited from having a chipper and trucks available.

“We opened the course Wednesday at lunch,” he said. “It took us probably another couple of weeks to get things cleaned up.”

In recent years, DCC had taken out about 300 trees that were affecting the playability of the golf course or taking too much moisture from the greens or other grassy areas.

Moraine has done the same thing over the last two years. Oddly, many trees that seemed vulnerable in the wind did not fall.

“We have a big poplar on the left side of the fairway on  No. 6,” Cox said. “It was struck by lightning many years ago and its middle is really hollow, but we haven’t taken it down because it’s important to the hole. It twisted like a corkscrew, but it wouldn’t go down.”

Cox said it took seven weeks and about $40,000 in labor (including overtime pay) to clean up the debris at DCC.

Bob Bajek, golf course superintendent at Community, said the City of Dayton’s 36-hole facility in Kettering “lost about 35 trees and had pretty extensive damage to 45 others.” A dozen of the damaged trees had to be cut down.

Because the ground got so soft that heavy equipment would damage the course, many of the fallen trees at the perimeter could not be removed from the property until recently, but Bajek said the fallen timber at both courses has been cleared.

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