PROJECTS Port Lincoln Golf Club’s new 14ML storage dam which is part of a major stormwater harvesting project recently completed
Following on from last edition’s Regional Profile, Port Lincoln Golf Club superintendent Andy Blacker
Reaping the
harvest
looks at the major stormwater harvesting and irrigation infrastructure project that is helping to transform the SA course.
W
hen I arrived at Port Lincoln Golf Club as superintendent seven years ago, a number of agronomic and management challenges were present that restricted the club from moving forward. Without doubt the biggest of these was the lack of a quality sustainable water supply and ageing irrigation infrastructure. Previously the club relied on potable water for the irrigation of greens and tees which cost around $100,000 per year. Coupled with that, the fairways were (and still are) irrigated using very high saline bore water (between 8000-11,000ppm). About two years into my tenure, together with the management committee, we started to explore options for an alternate water source. The whole process, from the initial
due diligence through to recent works, has taken around five years, but the club has taken a major step in ensuring it has a far more sustainable future. The primary aim of our investigations was to find an alternate water source that would replace mains water and to use the annual savings to pay back borrowed funds put in place to meet the infrastructure costs of the scheme. The scheme also served to address the other key issue of updating our deteriorating and labour intensive old irrigation system. We identified several options but it was clear the most affordable one that had an immediate payback was to harvest stormwater off of an adjacent bitumen road and store it in a dam. We were fortunate that the local council was about to start major
upgrades to the road and we negotiated to have drainage swales created along the road reserve and to have that water directed into the club at two key points. The Lower Eyre council was fantastic and invested $30K into providing us with the interception points and culverts that delivered the water to our boundary. This got the water into our property at no cost but we needed a place to store it and a mechanism to get it from the roadside into the storage point. Concurrently to this we commissioned a hydrogeological study to determine if two old bores that were cased but not equipped could provide us with water that could be pumped into the new dam and be shandied with the stormwater. This wasn’t a cheap process and that study alone cost $20K. What we did determine thankfully was that one of those bores had a consistent low volume supply of water suitable for use on greens that would yield 7ML per annum. By undertaking detailed analysis of soil types and rainfall events utilising an engineering firm (MLEI), we determined that we would harvest 8ML from our stormwater scheme and a further 2ML from a lined dam of approximately 5000 square metres. In total, the overall scheme would yield 17ML which would reduce our mains water consumption by nearly 70 per cent. This represented an annual saving of just under $60K per annum. MLEI were engaged at this point to produce a design for a new dam adjacent to our 18th hole. Construction of the new dam and connecting drains occurred between April
The 500m transfer drains connect the road reserve to the new dam. The final 3m-wide x 600m deep lined swale drain has been designed to maximise capture and minimise any losses through overflow or soakage 58
AUSTRALIAN TURFGRASS MANAGEMENT 21.1