Mink Meadows Turf Maintenance Department: Golf Club Road Drainage Project

I mentioned in my last newsletter article the completion of the road project we did on Golf Club Road to fix the drainage issue we incurred with the creation of the new house adjacent to the ninth fairway. We took the simple approach and used surface drainage or pitch to remove the water from the road surface. A couple of sub-surface or piped plans were floated around but these were more costly and potentially prone to failure, in my opinion. Not to imply that lowering the road for 100+ feet is simple, especially on MV where you never know what or where anything is under a road. Luckily all we hit was the abandoned cable feed to the old house.
We raised the low section where the puddles accumulated all summer and lowered the necessary section enough to create the right pitch for the water to flow downhill towards the parking lot. The water was then directed off the road towards the sound into an existing drain (patch of woods) before it reaches the parking lot.This was done in the fall and we left it that way to test the work. It worked perfectly.The only issue was the lowered section was basically sand and did not hold up well, as we expected. Because the pitch is so slight we had to lower the section more to be able to add a suitable road material. The lowering was made more difficult in some ways because the ground was frozen. The pictures show some of the puddles you remember driving through all summer and the work done to repair the issue.