January’s snow, ice and wind took a heavy toll on the South Sound’s golf courses, stripping branches from thousands of trees and creating major cleanup and disposal problems.
The damage to trees on courses was so severe, some course managers are comparing the effects to the Northwest’s legendary disasters, the Columbus Day Storm of 1962 and the infamous ice storm of December 1996.
“Just about every tree on the course has a big pile of branches under it,” said Taylor Ferris, the golf pro at Allenmore Public Golf Course. “The non-native trees got the worst of it – the willows, the poplars – all the pretty trees.”
For some courses, the storm put a quick end to a winter golf season that started out more profitably than usual because of December’s unseasonably mild weather. Courses now are dealing not only with heavy cleanup costs but also with losses from post-storm closures, which at some courses lasted two weeks.
Lake Spanaway Golf Course in Spanaway was among the hardest hit, according to Mitch Nelson, a maintenance supervisor at the Pierce County-owned course. Eight mature fir trees as large as 2 feet in diameter fell over, Nelson said, and most of the rest of the hundreds of trees on the course lost limbs.
“The limb debris is just crazy,” he said. “We’re looking at probably a month of limb cleanup alone.”
Falling trees and limbs damaged the course’s perimeter fence in six places, Nelson said, causing an estimated $3,500 worth of damage.
“It’s a mess, but we just peck away at it,” he said. “We’ll get through.”
Allenmore and Lake Spanaway, like many courses, cleared fairways of storm debris by moving branches and broken limbs to the side, lining fairways with piles that in places are several feet high.
The cleanup job is being made worse by a regional shortage of wood chippers, said Brian Kennedy, pro-shop manager at Allenmore.
“We have our own chipper, but it’s not big enough,” he said. “We’ve been looking to rent, but we can’t even get one right now, the demand is so high.”
At Fircrest Golf Club, a private 80-year-old club with hundreds of towering fir trees, the damage was relatively minor, said Jeff Highland, the club’s general manager.
“We have so many trees, I think they kind of protected each other,” Highland said. “There are piles of debris, but everything pretty much fell directly down beneath the trees, which left the putting greens and traps pretty clear.”
Even so, Highland said the club’s winter grounds staff of 12 has been working overtime on cleanup duty, and he’s hired professional arborists to take care of the damage in the tallest trees.
All 18 holes at Fircrest were open one week after the storm, Highland said.
The golf course least affected was Pierce County’s Chambers Bay Golf Course in University Place, where the 2015 Open will be played.
Chambers Bay is a links-style course, which means no trees.
The only tree on the entire 950-acre course is the iconic Douglas fir behind the 15th green.
The “Lone Fir,” which survived a vandal’s ax attack in 2008, was not damaged in the storm, said Matt Allen, Chambers Bay’s general manager.
“I suppose it did lose a small branch or two,” he said, “but sitting out there on the bluff like it has for all these years, it’s probably seen weather like this lots of times.”
Rob Carson: 253-597-8693
rob.carson@thenewstribune.com
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