Drainage

Water management — shedding water from playing surfaces where it is not desired and irrigating surfaces when watering is needed — can affect sustainability significantly. Drainage design determines how much drainage engineering is required on the site and how much is required to treat the waste water that emerges from the development.

The golf course itself should be viewed not only as land that needs to be drained, but as a catchment that can receive and treat surface and sub-surface runoff through natural systems.

Open ditches are often underrated as components in the drainage system. Not only are they a means of achieving efficient, flexible flow rates and are relatively easy to maintain, but from the environmental perspective they provide habitat. A well-designed and constructed open ditch, with a variable cross-section and gradient, rough bank profile, and naturally curved alignment, will rapidly colonise to provide a range of ecological niches and will become a useful wildlife corridor. Ditches may also be attractive landscape features and strategic golfing hazards in their own right.

Piped, culverted, canalised and attenuated drainage systems degrade natural catchment processes and ecosystems and create trains of engineering and mechanised treatment. As a result, golf developments should use natural drainage flows as much as possible.

Integral to landform design should be its water-shedding characteristics. Intent should always be to achieve complete, positive surface drainage away from all playing areas, avoiding any potential ponding. Courses have successfully used landforms, slopes, and swales to shed water to out-of-play areas, ponds and wetlands. In financial terms, there are huge construction and maintenance cost savings to be accrued through a focus on softer and more localised engineering solutions for site drainage.

Dry regions need a different drainage approach than wetter regions. In the desert, open water features can lead to significant loss of this precious resource through evaporation. Instead, pipework along with engineered water treatment and underground water storage are better approaches to capture and reuse course runoff for irrigation.

Where piped drainage is required, the system should incorporate inspection chambers and silt traps in key locations — for example, where a change of direction, gradient or pipe diameter occurs. These are all potential locations for the deposition of sediment which may therefore be easily removed during routine maintenance to prevent transfer to adjacent watercourses. In addition, where piped drainage outfalls to a watercourse or water feature, headwalls are advisable to prevent the erosion of banks and resulting sediment contamination.