Rebuilding starts with people

Kelly Shumate can relate to what his peers in parts of the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia and Tennessee are facing in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

Shumate is the director of agronomy at The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. His 14-year tenure at the four-course resort includes consistently providing high-level conditions for guests, hosting multiple televised golf tournaments, renovating historic layouts and designing a par-3 course. He also has guided a team through a natural disaster recovery.

Severe storms and subsequent flooding unexpectedly battered southern West Virginia on June 23, 2016. The damage destroyed The Greenbrier’s popular and historic golf courses. Following the floods, Shumate’s team faced an enormous challenge: rebuilding the courses to host the PGA Tour’s Greenbrier Classic and resort guests the following July.  

The story of The Greenbrier’s recovery proved inspirational, and Shumate’s experiences are a valuable resource for peers coping with a natural disaster. After seeing images of the inland devastation caused by Hurricane Helene, Shumate offered guidance for handling the human and tactical elements of a prolonged recovery.

Take care of your families, take care of your loved ones, take care of your communities. The first thing is tell your employees that there are more important things right now. If you have to deal with them, you deal with them first. With the human side of it, it’s not like the old days where you have everybody come in for a meeting. You can just send out a group text to all your staff and check on them and make sure they’re OK and let them know you understand their situation. My advice for a superintendent is that they need to get ahold of all their employees and tell them there are bigger, pressing needs right now. Good employers want to check on their employees anyway.

For the big picture of your course, if you’re a superintendent, make sure you get with club officials and whoever handles the side of things with insurance policies. The first thing we did was go around and document everything. We took loads and loads of pictures and documented everything. It’s just like a house. If you have fire damage or storm damage to your house, and you go fix your roof and a tree fell on it and you didn’t take pictures — and it’s fixed — with insurance, you’re going to lose that battle. It doesn’t take a lot of time to send a team of people around your facility to take pictures and put them in a document with how much rain you had in this timeframe.

Superintendents in this region are at the end of the season. Most of us are aerifying our courses or thinking about aerifying, or they’ve already completed aerification. This region just went through a very challenging summer with drought conditions. Everybody’s had a long season. Don’t feel overwhelmed. You’ve got to tell yourself we can’t fix this overnight and it’s going to be a process. If your facility was severely damaged and you’re staring at being closed for an extended period of time, odds are you have other employees at your facility who might not be on the maintenance staff such as golf professionals or operational staff members that aren’t serving guests. Sit down, make a plan and try to get access to some of those people to help. That’s what we did here. Our whole staff was a major help for us. There’s a certain amount of respect and it opens their eyes to what we deal with on a daily basis.

One thing that I realized way up front was that it was going to take the better part of a year to rebuild our facilities. There are going to be certain things that you probably need to delegate out. You’re going to have to lean on some of your assistants and other people to take the lead on some things because you just can’t do it all yourself. Take it one day at a time. Every facility has some go-to people to help you, and they don’t have to be an assistant or a shop coordinator. If you’re starting a big-time project, odds are the insurance company, and your membership or, if you’re daily-fee facility the public, will want you to open as soon as possible. And the way to get open as soon as possible is not to try to do everything yourself.

Once you can get in there, you should protect your turf from whatever is coming next. One thing on the agronomic end that we did that really saved us a lot was knowing what turf could be salvaged or wouldn’t be touched by a renovation. We got a mow on those areas, cleaned them up, and went out with a super, super high rate of growth regulator on them, because I knew we were going to need to have that plant protected and we weren’t going to have the time to be out there doing daily maintenance. We almost put them to bed for a month with growth regulators and fungicide just so we could go and work on other things.

Check to make sure your water sources aren’t contaminated. And if they are, you need to get ahead of that and start thinking about what you’re going to do for water until you can get the situation fixed. When you’re dealing with flooding, a major, major problem is getting silt off surfaces. There are a lot of ways you can do that. You can use box blades on the back of a tractor, you can use the dozer blade on the SandPro. If it’s a minor silt deposit and your irrigation systems are intact, the silt can be washed off. The sooner you can get that silt layer off your surfaces, the better off you’re going to be.

Golf course industry people take a sense of pride in their work, and they want their facility to be put back and strive for it to be even better. If you’re going to have to shut down for months, you can take that opportunity to not only fix your problems but also try to improve what you had. Tell the team around you, ‘Look at how much better we’re going to be when this is all put back together.’ Focus on that and realize it’s not going to happen overnight. Your golf facility wasn’t built overnight. Unfortunately, it can get destroyed overnight.

Don't be afraid to ask for help if you need it. I was very fortunate. I know a lot of people in the industry that I called on and got advice from. There are people in county or municipal agencies that you can lean on. Most of the time you’ll find out people will do anything if you ask them to help you if they know you need help.

Guy Cipriano is Golf Course Industry’s publisher + editor-in-chief.