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Golf is highly engaging, multi dimensional, ever changing. Designing and building a course is very similar. It's a multi dimensional challenge, each site offering its own twists. Elizabeth DeFriest takes a look at how three different courses came into being...
Storing Water Underground
The Palm Grove Golf Complex in Perth has a slightly off-beat origin. It's built on what would be best described as a tip, and while that's not unusual as far as golf courses go, what is a bit different is the way the old tip still has a function beneath the turf. Palm Grove's David Curry, who prior to developing the complex, was in the business of disposing tyres. "We were a designated facility, and we'd make money charging for the tipping of builders' rubble and tyres."
The area being filled in had been a clay quarry for bricks with two pits together totalling 314,000m3. Once filled, David took a friend's advice and began development of the golf complex, but he brought to the equation a fresh viewpoint when he decided to make the landfill keep on working. It's common sense - to use the pits to store water for recycling - but David doesn't know of anyone else, at least in Western Australia, who is doing it.
"In each of the filled pits we dug out the equivalent of a cone 7.5 metres deep with a diameter of 30 metres at the top rim. Having placed a section of slotted concrete pipe down the centre of each, we then back-filled with shredded tyres." Geo-mesh went over the top followed by a layer 400 millimetres thick of clay, then 600 millimetres of sand and finally the turf which forms the greens and fairways of the Palm Grove Complex's nine hole Supa golf range. The pits act as underground reservoirs, storing water in the smaller 50,000 litre pit first, with excess water pumped into the larger one which holds 250,000 litres. "It serves like any dam except that because it's covered, we don't get algae growth." The cones are an engineering solution that allows access to water quickly. The area of the cone can be pumped out with ease, refilling from the reservoir around it.
And before you think storing water in this way would compromise its quality, David explains that tyres are virtually inert. "The reservoirs also fill the ponds here at the complex, with yabbies, koi and enough frogs to get us a few complaints about the noise." Perhaps because David doesn't use pesticides (growing bird numbers take care of the pests), fertilisers with phosphates, or herbicides (they hand-weed the 12 hectares), there is no chemical build up in the reservoirs. However, a year after the Supa golf course opened, it was obvious that there was a problem. "It was high in salt, (2,400 parts per million) leached from the sand used over the capping." And there were also high levels of iron associated with the tyres. A company called Hydrosmart had some very simple and effective technology to sort things out.
"Two or three months after we put the system in at Palm grove, David described the course as looking like it had been top dressed and fertilised," said Paul Pearce from Hydrosmart. "As it turned out, only one of his two systems was actually plugged in so that by the time we spoke again he was over the moon about the regrowth in the bare areas."
Palm Grove was a retrofit to pipework lying above ground. Given the diameter of the pipe (4 inch), two systems were needed, mounted five metres apart. Without going too deeply into Hydrosmart's particle research origins, as water flows through the pipe, it passes through fields generated by a mini computer and powered by 12 volts. The bonds holding the iron and the salts are neutralised, and as far as David Curry is concerned, no longer a problem.
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