Sunday - November 30, 2008

What a weekend, so much for a day off. Friday night about 10:30 PM I got a call from Greg about a main-line water break on hole number seven. I jumped out of bed and rushed to the course to check it out. When I got there the water was shooting higher then the palm trees, so I immediately shut off the irrigation pumps. It's a good thing that Greg gave me a call, because the water was collecting in the low area over by the houses and was only about 6" from going over the wall and into their back yards. On Saturday morning we discovered that it was a 3" main-line that had broken and of course, we didn't have all the necessary parts to repair it. We ran around trying to track down the repair parts, but all our usual suppliers were closed and Home Depot and Lowe's do not carry anything over two inch. We then decided that we would shut down the main-line valves and isolate the area so that if we needed to irrigate any other areas, we could. Well, that proved harder then we thought. The three guys that know the irrigation system the best were not around. My Irrigator and Crew Foreman are off on medical leave and my Assistant Richard is on vacation. We finally thought we found the valves and had it isolated. We fired the system back up, blew the air out of the lines to avoid an air gap power surge, which would cause another break, and headed home for the day. About an hour or so later, I get a call that it is leaking again. Apparently, there was another valve that needed to be shut down somewhere that we didn't find, so we again shut the pumps down, made some phone calls and found out where the valve we missed was located and started the whole process over again Sunday morning. Hopefully, we won't get a call today that it is leaking.

I guess I should explain why our pump station did not shut down automatically once the break occurred. Our pump station will usually shut down when we have a major break with a "low discharge pressure" safety shut down. But because we were not watering the course that night because of the rain, and no sprinklers were running, and because the break was only a 3" pipe, two of the four irrigation pumps were all that were needed to keep the system at normal operating pressure. Therefore, the pump station did not recognise a low pressure situation. If we had been watering that night, or had it been a 6" or larger main-line, it would have lost enough pressure to shut it down Immediately. I guess you can still find flaws in even the newest pump stations. Someday, technology will catch up and correct this, but until then there will still be some restless nights.