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THE HONDA CLASSICMarch 1, 2015Lukus HarveryPALM BEACH GARDENS, FLORIDA Q. General assessment of how we are, what all was involved to get it where we are. LUKUS HARVEY: Sure. In just over two and a half hours yesterday, we got four inches of rain, and then another half an inch throughout the night. So total is four and a half inches of rain. To be honest, quite devastating to the golf course. Throw that in with some 60‑mile‑an‑hour wind gusts. We lost three trees. Two on No. 1, one on No. 12, but that was really out of play. The two on 1 that were in play, one was right behind the green and one was to the left of the landing zone in the fairway. At the end of the day, I think I saw on Twitter some of the pictures. The rain came so fast and furious, that on 18 and 11 green, the water level and the lake rose so fast it actually backed up the drainpipe for the green and created air bubbles that were almost knee high. Fortunately for us, the lake bubbles went down so we were able to just let it recede naturally and just went out and took a roller and rolled those areas to smooth them back out so they were playable this morning. The bunkers, though, were a total‑‑ the bunkers were a total loss. All the sand was washed off the faces down to the bottom, which then exposes the native soil and flips like the silt and the black dirt over on top of it. Basically what we did is, my superintendents, about 20 of us stayed last night. I think we shut the gates about 12:30 in the morning. We ran three‑inch garbage pumps all night long pumping water back into the lake. Even with that, six bunkers, you would pump it out but the lake level was higher than the actual bunker so it came back in. So we had to leave a few of them. And I heard Tim Rosaforte mention it on the Golf Channel because I told him, it was an interesting night when the water level gets that high. The gators and snakes kind of roam free. We had to chase a gator out of three fairway bunkers so we could pump it, and a couple moccasins were in the way; so makes for an interesting night. The rest of the golf course it did pretty well. It's wet. Obviously that's why they are playing lift, clean and place. We are not able to mow the fairways today or tomorrow unfortunately. But we are able to mow the greens. We are able to mow the tees, all the surrounds. It's my team, my superintendent, Andrew Fike, he led 78 guys, between pumping out last night and 78 guys this morning and we were able to put every bunker back into play. There's not anything that's ground under repair or casual water. Q. How much did you have to bring in any sand‑‑ LUKUS HARVEY: We didn't bring in any. We were able to salvage what was there. To be honest there was no time to get it here. There would have been no time to get it in and out on the golf course. Q. How many bunkers do you have? LUKUS HARVEY: 72. Q. Where did the 78 guys come from? LUKUS HARVEY: All that staff, it was all of our guys plus we had like ten volunteers‑‑ I'm sorry, eight volunteers that had come down from TPC Sawgrass that were here just for the week to work. The local superintendents, my peers, my friends, were awesome. I must have got 30 text messages: What can we do, what can we do. That's where all the trash pumps came from. All of a sudden I turned around and there was a dozen pumps on my front door. So a lot of local guys really helped out. Q. What were your actual hours like last night? LUKUS HARVEY: Our normal day starts at 3:45 in the morning, and then so I lock the gate at 12:30 am, and we were back at 3:45 again. So just a quick little two‑hour nap in between. Q. How many about monetary damage? LUKUS HARVEY: You know, easily six figures. Easily that. Q. That's over a 100,000, maybe a little bit more? LUKUS HARVEY: If you're counting the amount of labor and everything, yeah, about a hundred, 120,0000. Q. Was it your guys call to push the start back to 10:00 AM? LUKUS HARVEY: Yeah, ultimately it's Slugger's call, but he's asked what we can do, and we gave it our best effort. I told him, you know, originally we thought maybe noon. But I said, let's shoot for 10, and guys came through. We were rolling off the golf course at 9:45. Q. Are you happy with the results today? LUKUS HARVEY: Couldn't be more happy. I mean, after the rain like that, and the wind and actually we had one tree struck by lightning, too. Q. Where was that? LUKUS HARVEY: No. 1, also. Couldn't be happier. Golf course is going to play as good as it possibly could with the weather. Q. At 7:00 what was state of the course? LUKUS HARVEY: This morning? We were over the hump. I'll say that much. That's when I first talked to Slugger for the morning update and I said, I think we are going to make it. You just don't know until you get into it. You look at it and take a wild guess, because it's not often that you have that amount of rain and then figure out how to try to pull off a TOUR event. Q. Did you have a challenge or was it stressful‑‑ LUKUS HARVEY: It's fun. It's only stressful if you make it that way. Q. Do you get overtime? LUKUS HARVEY: I do not (laughter). My hourly rate went the other way. Listen, I ran out last night when we were working, went to Papa John's down the road and got 15 pizzas and carried around sodas and bottles of water for everyone and ate and made sure we were hydrated all night long. Q. How many pumps did you use? LUKUS HARVEY: We ended up using 12. Q. Anyway to gauge how many gallons of water were pumped off? LUKUS HARVEY: Not off the top of my head, no. Q. If the course in perfect condition is 100 percent, where is it right now? LUKUS HARVEY: I would call it 80 percent. Minus the fairways being soft, everything is still there. Still have stout rough and we were able to mow the greens. Q. So the main problem is soft fairways? LUKUS HARVEY: And wet sand. Ideally you'd like that nice, firm dry sand but can't control that. Q. If they didn't do lift, clean and place it would be a big issue? LUKUS HARVEY: Yeah, that was the absolute right call there. Q. What did you have to do for the greens, if anything? LUKUS HARVEY: Really, they just had a lot of debris. So picking up sticks and branches by hand, and then letting them dry out a little bit. But they are USGA spec greens and everything that we do to them, they drain really well. Q. So as the lake levels went down, like the water on 18 green‑‑ LUKUS HARVEY: Yeah, there's a‑‑ we marked the lake level at the very beginning out on the corner of the lake on 3, and you know, by the time we got back at 3:45, 4:00 by the time we checked it, the lakes went down by three feet. Q. Do you have to call South Florida Water Management‑‑ LUKUS HARVEY: It's actually Northern Palm Beach County district. We called to make sure their pumps and wind structures were working. Of course they didn't answer (laughter) so we got in a truck and drove out there and saw that they were basically working. Q. They are pretty much automatic? LUKUS HARVEY: Yeah, they are all set on levels and everything. Q. Where were you when the storm went through and what were you thinking? LUKUS HARVEY: Obviously we were on the TOUR radio, so the TOUR meteorologist was calling everything in and telling everybody to get everybody off the golf course. It's actually kind of a funny story because you go back to yesterday, we had had rain the day before and had to stop play and not being able to mow fairways and different things. So yesterday morning, we went into trying to finish the second round with the fairways not cut, tees not cut that, type of stuff, but we had dried out enough overnight. Well, Slugger came to me in a rare circumstance, gave us permission to go out between the second and third round, that one‑hour, it was actually a two‑hour gap yesterday, and he went out and mowed the golf course, raked all the bunkers and did all the prep like we normally would do either late evening or early morning. We did all that, finished it, play went off, and you know, 20 minutes later, play stopped again and all that work that we did was washed away. To answer your question, our whole team was here. So we were huddled up in the maintenance facility hoping that it wasn't going to blow away, as well. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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