Never has a cigar tasted so good. It’s barely a week after the Brisbane River has turned the lives of tens of thousands of Brisbane residents upside down, yet for McLeod Country Golf Club superintendent Peter Daly it is time to celebrate.

Together with his assistant Phil Boag and the rest of the McLeod course maintenance crew, Daly has spent the best part of the last week knee-deep in thick, stinking mud, pushing, scraping and dragging a mountain of silt off greens and tees which has been deposited by the incredible volume of floodwaters that inundated 90 per cent of the course.

As well as being immensely therapeutic and providing Daly with a brief and welcome respite away from the heartbreaking condition of the course, sparking up the Cuban represents the first milestone achieved on the long road to getting his beloved club back on its feet. Cleaning off the greens and tees is on the top of an exhaustive list of jobs facing Daly and the sense of relief and satisfaction of being able to put a line through it is almost palpable.

Given what he has endured in the past week, few would begrudge Daly such a small indulgence. It’s not every day that you watch on helpless as your course turns into an inland ocean and becomes a victim of one of the greatest natural disasters in Australian history. Despite being one to always look on the lighter side of life, even Daly struggles to comprehend what has just happened three weeks shy of him notching up 10 years at the club.

“You just can’t fathom it,” says Daly. “It’s like a disaster zone, yet you drive 10 minutes away and it is like nothing has happened. We have markers from the 1974 floods on the course so we knew what was coming, but I don’t think we really believed it until we saw it.”

A few kilometres upstream at Wolston Park Golf Club, superintendent Warren Langlands is also trying to get his head around what he has just witnessed. Standing next to a mini skip stacked high with what was once the contents of his office, the look of disbelief is still plastered across his face. That disbelief, however, is slowly replaced by the grim reality of the task that now confronts him and his small team to get the course back into some form of playable condition.

Among the sodden contents of the skip lies 15 years of Langlands’ detailed course maintenance records – from diaries which he religiously wrote in, spray records, equipment and product purchases, inventories, parts manuals, the lot – all destroyed. “I’ve been here 15 years and it’s the first time I’ve seen anything like this,” says Langlands. “When I first got down here after the flood waters receded, I opened the door to the office but quickly closed it again. It’s pretty heartbreaking.”

A few bends in the river downstream and at Indooroopilly Golf Club the full extent of just how devastating the floods have been is on show for all to see. Driving through the gates of the 36-hole complex you would be forgiven for thinking what all the fuss is about and aside from a washed out fence and a small but steady trickle of water across the entrance road, the course is seemingly in excellent order.

Continue up to the clubhouse, however, and the jaw quickly drops. What would normally be a sea of green is now an ocean of dark brown as far as the eye can see. Everything – greens, tees, fairways, roughs, bunkers, cart paths, trees and shrubs – is smothered in a muddy film, the smell of freshly cut turf replaced by the pungent and unpleasant stench of silt and goodness knows what else.

A fleet of 11 posi-tracks, which course superintendent Charlie Giffard has managed to source from all over south east Queensland, drone away in the background, pushing a seemingly endless amount of silt off fairways, while a swamp dozer does likewise on the practice range.

Down in the maintenance compound, a muddy watermark near the roofline of the main storage shed provides a shocking reminder of the sheer volume of water that has ripped through the place. Waters reached 8.5m above normal river levels and while most of Indooroopilly’s big ticket items were evacuated to higher ground, the compound remains littered with flood-damaged equipment, chemicals and product.

“It’s a life-changing event that’s for sure, but now that the levels have gone back down we just want to get stuck in and start reclaiming areas of the course and get it back up as soon as possible,” says Giffard. “For now it’s about trying to rally the staff, the members and the club and figuring out just where to go from here. The road ahead will be long, but we’ll get there eventually, one hole at a time.”

These are just some of the scenes that were being played out at many golf clubs and turf facilities which reside along the Brisbane River in the week after the unprecedented floods hit the city during the second week of January. From Karana Downs, which literally had one of its holes swept into the river, to Jindalee which lost everything and further down to Indooroopilly and Brisbane just a few clicks from the Brisbane CBD, numerous golf courses and turf facilities were left decimated.

It was the culmination of an extreme spring and summer for the whole of Queensland, the likes of which had never witnessed before. After notching its wettest spring on record, Queensland would record its wettest December on record and in the first two weeks of the New Year further deluges pushed catchments to breaking point.

Brisbane’s Wivenhoe Dam, constructed after the Australia Day floods in 1974, was at bursting point, receiving inflows of up to one million megalitres a day which necessitated the massive release of water into the Brisbane River. At times, up to 170,000 megalitres a day flowed through Wivenhoe’s spill gates and over a four day period from 11-14 January the nation watched as river reached breaking point and inundated more than 30 Brisbane suburbs and tens of thousands of homes, business and facilities.

For the likes of Daly, Giffard, Langlands and the rest of their superintendent and turf management colleagues, to see their facilities laid to waste has been incomprehensible and you can only hope they’ll never have to witness another event like it in their time.

Yet, true to the resilient nature which is the hallmark of many within the profession, these practitioners have proven in the weeks after the floods that there isn’t much that they can’t handle. Together with their crews and the help of members, they have thrown themselves unsparingly into the horrendous task of cleaning up their courses. While some have fared better than others, across the board the desire of all superintendents has been clear – to get their facilities back bigger and better than they were before the floods hit.

What a difference a month makes

A month on from the floods and countless hours of back-breaking overtime later, the progress most courses have made is, quite simply, remarkable. Brisbane Golf Club had all 18 holes open for play by Australia Day, while Oxley Golf Club and Indooroopilly’s East Course were also open within a matter of weeks.

For clubs to get anywhere near opening stage required an incredible undertaking on behalf of course maintenance crews, as well as an army of volunteers. At Brisbane Golf Club, course superintendent Ben Cavanagh had more than 160 volunteers turn up in the days after the floods while at Indooroopilly, more than 250 members rolled up, including a group of lady members who had the delightful task of cleaning out the maintenance facility.

“After seeing the silt deposits when the waters finally receded and to see where we are at now, I am pleasantly surprised,” says Giffard. “What faced us on the Saturday immediately after the floods was difficult to comprehend. We more or less started out from the clubhouse and literally dug our way down to the shed.

“You did wonder how on earth we were going to come out of this, but after we got the posi-tracks in and you could see changes each day and some green life coming back, you did start to have some hope. Initially, any progress was fantastic. It was hard yakka rallying all the staff and volunteers and trying to keep some good humour about the whole situation, but I think where we are at now everyone can be very proud of their efforts.”

With most turf surfaces now cleaned up and slowly recovering, attention is shifting to repairing infrastructure such as irrigation and staff amenities which were damaged. While many had temporary pumping arrangements rigged up relatively quickly, getting their full complement of pumps online is ongoing, and in the case of Jindalee superintendent Tony Richards has had to rely solely on Mother Nature.

Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, Brisbane has received plenty of rain in the six weeks after the floods and despite a relatively dry spell toward the end of January, fifteen of the first 21 days of February saw persistent daily falls of between 1mm and 21mm. While Jindalee’s greens have reveled in the conditions, the flip side of course is that the rain has further delayed reinstatement works at most courses.

For those club’s whose maintenance facilities were inundated and machinery lost, progress varies. While work has started to refit the staff areas within the Indooroopilly maintenance compound, by contrast the Brisbane shed is still the bombsite that was left behind when floodwaters finally receded.

Cavanagh’s office remains piled high with ruined furniture, computer components and flood-damaged folders while chairs, upturned fridges and silt-covered work gear remain strewn throughout the locker rooms and lunchroom. Even the mud-stained sign proclaiming ‘Clean your shoes, please’ still clings resolutely to the entrance door to the staff amenities areas.

What could be salvaged, such as mechanic tools, has been moved into a temporary maintenance facility which will more than likely be the Brisbane crew’s home for the next three months as the club continues down the path of getting insurance assessments and deliberating possible alternatives on where and in what form a new facility might be constructed.

At Jindalee, where the maintenance facility was one of the first areas to go under and last to re-emerge, the clean up process has been painstaking. With just two full-time and one part-time staff and little in the way of resources, the road back has and will continue to be a long. It took almost four weeks to get power reconnected, but of more concern for Richards is been getting flood-damaged machinery back in working order. With the small nine-hole club simply not having the cash reserves to afford machinery or engine replacements, Richards has had to rely on a local mechanic stripping back engines in an effort to get them working again.

“We are doing the best we can,” says Richards. “We were able to get the fairway mower going so for the first time in about a month we were able to get out and give the fairways a cut. We have got a couple of machines still to get up and running, but until then people will just have to be patient. There is talk that the machinery shed will be relocated to a higher point on the course and hopefully that will happen because the club simply can’t afford another event like this.”

Steady as she goes

For the likes of Oxley superintendent Shane McDonald and Peter Daly at McLeod who haven’t had to worry about losing their maintenance facilities, the primary concern now is getting their turf back to optimum health before winter and also trying to balance the needs of the turf with constant requests from management to lower cutting heights.

“Our root system, which was 25cm deep before the floods, is back to between 7cm-10cm,”says Daly. “Some greens were down to as little as 3cm after the floods but they are getting stronger each day which is encouraging. We still have two greens – 15 and 17, which were under for six days – that haven’t quite reached the level of the others, but it’s just a matter of getting them back slowly and not stressing them too much before bringing them back into play.

“Everyone’s in the same boat and I’m sure we’ve all been placed under pressure by management to get everything open as quickly as possible and then to start lowering cutting heights. At the end of the day, though, you can’t put too much pressure on the turf after such an event like this. Concentrating further stress on greens by getting them down too quick will only cause further problems in the long run and in most cases will undo all the good work we have done to date.

“It has been a funny season. As well as the rain, it has been very cool and the lack of sunshine has really affected growth. I reckon we might be in for an early winter and the last thing we need is to go into winter with stressed greens because you can’t do anything then. Our concentration now is getting the greens in as good a condition root-wise as possible, while we are feeding up the fairways with liquids (fertiliser) and mowing them at every opportunity to get them to grow over.” Daly said.

Cavanagh shares Daly’s sentiments and while his surfaces were brought back into play relatively quickly, their management over the next couple of months will be critical, as will educating members and committees that while the surfaces may look okay to the eye, underneath it can be a different story.

“We were fortunate not to have the amount of silt that say Indooroopilly had and although our greens have come back well, even four weeks later there is still a hell of a lot of silt coming out of them when we are coring,” says Cavanagh. “The big thing is trying to educate the committee and membership about what happens when the silt settles and gets down into the profile and the long-term problems that can eventuate. They have to understand that getting the course back to what it was before the floods is a big job. It’s not just a matter of coming back out and cutting at normal heights.”

If there is one thing that has surprised all superintendents, it’s the ability of their couchgrass to recover despite the hammering it has received, whether through water inundation, machinery traffic during the clean-up process or the mandatory renovations to remove silt within the profile. Another upside has been that the floodwaters have provided a rather drastic form of weed control and many fairways are now clean of undesirables such as crowsfoot, wire weed, paspalum and carpetgrass.

While reinstating turf surfaces and course infrastructure has been the primary focus in the weeks immediately after the floods, attention is also slowly turning to reinstating other areas. On top of an unenviable list is reinstating and refurbishing bunkers which in most cases have been left untouched apart from a quick initial clean out of silt and debris. Many will need to be completely reconstructed, a process which will keep many going for the remainder of the year.

Then there are the smaller but no less time-consuming tasks of repairing pathways that were either gouged out or simply washed away, replacing mulch in garden beds and replanting trees (Oxley, for instance, lost more than 100 drought-tolerant plants and trees, many of which had only been recently planted).

Lessons learnt

As with any major disaster of this scale, the lessons learnt have been many and varied, even if they have been discovered the hard way. The events have brought out of the best in most and the worst in just a handful, but ask any of those Brisbane superintendents affected and the positive generally outweigh the negative and they will be taking plenty away from the unprecedented event.

For Giffard, the standout was the camaraderie that was discovered not only among the maintenance staff but within the different departments of the golf club. Mucking in together, it has helped to forge some new friendships and has given those who work in the clubhouse an appreciation of what the maintenance crew has to put with sometimes. Giffard says it was also good to have the interaction and connection with the members and he hopes they too will take something away from the experience.

“Without wanting to sound boastful, I think we did a pretty bloody good job,” reflects Giffard. “We kept a very close eye on everything from staff fatigue to managing the volunteers and that’s half the reason why we are so far down the track. It has been a very good experience in that regard and everyone has done their bit, from Dale (Durant) the CEO, Darren (Richards) the director of golf and Jon Mathias who helped us with HR issues.

“I really can’t think of anything that I wouldn’t do again. We are certainly now a lot more wary of infrastructure and how we set ourselves up for the future so that if something does happen again we will be able to remove stuff quickly. I guess the only thing I would do differently is get the posi-tracks in a few days earlier than we did. They really saved us and the amount of silt they were able to remove and their ability to work in the conditions was quite remarkable. Even the operators were impressed.” Griffand said.

Across the river at Brisbane, for Cavanagh it was the importance of ensuring the welfare of his staff in the wake of the floods, especially seeing they didn’t have a maintenance facility to operate of, and keeping a good sense of humour. As well as organising some good temporary accommodation for his crew, Cavanagh inadvertently did his bit for staff morale after he managed to bog one of the machines. What made his efforts priceless was that only a few hours earlier he had dished out a serve to one of his younger staff member for doing the exact same thing!

“It has certainly been a learning experience,” states Cavanagh. “The big thing for me was keeping the morale of the staff high, because if you don’t have the guys behind you working towards a common goal, you’re pushing uphill from the start. My blokes were fantastic, but you have to be flexible given the situation and be mindful that this is just as hard on them as it is on you. Setting two or three goals each week and ticking them off as you go was also important but at the same time not over-extending and trying to reach for too much.”

For someone like Warren Langlands who relied heavily on manually documenting his maintenance operations at Wolston Park, he would have paid more attention to salvaging his records. The major realisation, however, is that he needs to be more computer savvy and were those records in an electronic format he wouldn’t be lamenting the loss of 15 years’ worth of knowledge.

One of the best things Shane McDonald did at Oxley was to take heed of the advice of some of club’s old timers who experienced the 1974 floods. On their word McDonald moved all machinery to higher ground – the shed went under in 1974 – but even though this time around the maintenance facility and pump shed were spared (even if it was only by a matter of metres), it was valuable having that reference.

“Looking back, if you didn’t have that advice you would think there would have been no way the water would get that high,” says McDonald. “We were of the mindset that it wouldn’t be that bad, but now we know what can happen, next time you would be more wary and plan ahead a lot better, both before and during the clean-up. We did prepare but we left a lot of things to last minute. If there is a next time you would start a lot earlier and we would probably have sandbagged areas like the pump station and shed.”

For Daly, who like most of his fellow Brisbane colleagues hopes to be in a retirement village reading about an event of this magnitude should one ever happen again, the one thing he wouldn’t do again is concern himself with mowing immediately before the floods. Thinking it best to try and mow as much as possible before the floods hit, Daly and his staff managed to knock off six greens before retreating back to the maintenance facility. Ironically, those six greens have taken longer to recover than those which had a little more leaf left on them and in the case of one green where only half the surface was mown there is a distinct difference between the section that was mown and the one that wasn’t.

Depending on the nature of the floodwaters too, Daly believes there could also be merit in putting tarpaulins across greens. In the case of the January floods, water levels rose and receded at a relatively slow and steady rate and Daly says that pegging down a few tarps across greens would have saved countless man hours scraping silt off in the aftermath.

Documenting a disaster

Hindsight is, of course, a wonderful thing and as the saying goes ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. If there is a common overriding thread among all those superintendents that have had to reinstate their courses after the events of early January, it’s their desire to document what has happened to them.

Whether it’s the various methods they used to remove silt from their turf surfaces, how to best manage staff and volunteers during the clean-up, or simply a priority list of things to do when a flood is imminent, it is their hope that by doing so will not only provide a useful future reference for their club but for the golf course and turf maintenance industries as a whole.

Both Brisbane and Indooroopilly are in the process of creating disaster management policies and procedures manuals which will become part of the fabric of each club that will be regularly reviewed and updated. At Brisbane, they have formed a disaster management committee comprising Cavanagh and members of the general committee who now meet on a fortnightly basis to brainstorm ideas. The aim is to have a document that will cover not just flood events but also any other major natural events which could potentially damage the course.

Daly too is in the process of putting together a dossier for McLeod. Already he has a wealth of material from the regular updates he posted onto his course maintenance blog documenting the mammoth clean-up effort, but being the joker that he is Daly would add a few special touches to such a document.

“It would have been great to have had some sort of reference to what the guys did here in 1974, outlining what happened, the damage to the course and the stuff they did that did and didn’t work when it came to cleaning up,” reflects Daly. “I’m not sure what I’m going to call it, but I reckon on the first page I’m going to have great big aerial photo of the course completely flooded with the words, ‘If you see the course like this — RUN’. Maybe I’ll include a plane ticket to Dubai!”

No doubt it will also contain a small glass compartment containing a Cuban cigar with the words ‘Break glass in case of emergency.’