Today marks the second day of summer (officially ... it's felt like summer in parts of the country for much longer than that), and in the Midwest, that typically means another severe weather season has come and gone. And this has been one for the record books, with mind-blowing devastation in places like Joplin, Mo., and Tuscaloosa, Ala.
You can add another location to that list, too, one that isn't used to seeing tornadoes at any time of the year — Springfield, Mass., which took a direct hit from a deadly tornado earlier this month. And one of the places in Springfield that suffered significant damage was Veterans Memorial GC, where 17-year GCSAA member Andy Gay serves as superintendent.
"Everyone on my crew and all the golfers who were on the course that day are fine," Andy told me. "The pro shop staff did a fabulous job of getting everyone off the course in time, and they actually road out the tornado in the pro shop. The grounds crew and I had left for the day, but my assistant and irrigation tech live right by the course and got a good look at things. We are all fine, too."
As the photos with this post show (including the one above, which shows the tornado rolling through the golf course property, located just behind the line of trees you see in back on the church), Gay and his team were left with a huge mess to clean up. As is the case in most of the instances where golf courses are impacted by severe storms, tree damage was the biggest problem at Veterans Memorial.
"We were fortunate that out of 20 greens, only one sustained real damage," Andy said. "Most tees and fairways are OK, except where there are large trees on them. All 11 irrigation satellites avoided any damage."
"The 'glass-half-full' part is that I will have great air movement and a lot more sunlight will get to those turf areas now," he added optimistically.
Immediately after the storm, Andy's crews got to work cleaning up what they could around the golf course while emergency crews focused their attention on the neighborhoods near the course that were also heavily damaged. "We pretty much cleared what we could handle off the major turf areas and were able to get back to some kind of a routine in terms of turf management. It was very tough moving around, but we did the best we could," Andy said. "The golf course was next in line after the neighborhoods in getting help removing the large downed trees."
Although life is slowly returning to some semblance of normalcy now, Andy knows the impact of this month's storm will be felt for many, many years. "You always hear comments from people in the Northeast during tornado season about how lucky we are not to have storms like they do in the Midwest and the South," he said. "We deal with a lot of snow and freezing cold spells during the winter, but we're used to those. This tornado stuff is just not something we are used to and never expect to see."
Below are a number of other photos Andy sent along of the tornado damage at Veterans Memorial GC. You can click on any of the photos to see a larger version of the images.
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