Santa Lucia Preserve: #15 Fairway Drainage Project

Upon arriving at the Preserve, I noticed that there were many areas that drainage was being improved. some of the fairways are more severely sloped than others. These are the fairways that needed drainage improvements. The problem is caused by water accumulating in localized spots along the sloped rough or fairway edges. The saturation can be seen here by looking at the hole that has filled completely with water.

Fig. 1

This concentration of water is mainly due to gravity carrying the water down the side of each slope onto the golf course, and is encouraged by the excessive number of ground squirrels and gophers. The holes created by these animals collect large amounts of water during heavy rainfall and empties out to the lowest openings, leaving a soggy unplayable surface. The water starts at the top of the slopes in the native brush, and carries through the animal holes onto the golf course where most of the lower slopes are. This problem is then magnified by the amount of maintenance equipment traffic running over the soggy areas leaving the site aesthetically unpleasing and unplayable. The solution to fixing this problem is to install drain lines that run parallel with the fairway direction (perpendicular to the slope) to intercept the water and let gravity carry it down hill to the nearest catch basin. That is exactly what we did on our drainage project on #15 fairway. In this drainage project, we first located the wet unplayable area, the nearest existing drain line, and the catch basin that emptied this existing drain line. By flagging off the wet area, we were able to measure out a new drain line that would intercept water running down the hill and carry it further downhill to the existing drain line, ultimately emptying to the catch basin. This can be seen below.

Fig. 2

We then took a Ryan sod-cutter and cut an 18" wide strip that ran perpendicular to the slope of the fairway that T'd downhill to the existing drain line.

Fig. 3

Once the sod was stripped, we used a walk-behind Ditch Witch to dig our drain line trenches.

Fig. 4

It is very important in this process to always remember that water runs downhill. We took this into consideration knowing that the catch basin is at the lowest elevation and the start of the drain lines are at the highest point in elevation. Now that our trenches were dug, we could start to install the plastic 4" perforated drain lines and connect them to the existing drain line. We used this pipe.

Fig. 5

The newly installed drain line that runs perpendicular to the slope is connected in the middle by a T fitting. The T fitting is a three-way fitting that made it possible for our pipe to run two pieces perpendicular to the slope, and the third piece to run parallel to the slope (downhill) to our existing drain line.

Fig. 6

The existing drain line is at a 45 degree angle above the catch basin and meets with the newly installed line with a Y fitting. This fitting is another three-way fitting that allows a straight line to fit into a line that is at a 45 degree angle.

Fig. 7

Once all of the drain lines were completely connected, we tied irrigation wire parallel to each pipe to conduct electricity for future tracing purposes.