Less than three weeks after hosting the PGA Tour’s second ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic, The Dunes Golf and Beach Club was hit by a severe weather occurrence that forced its closure for a couple days.
According to The Dunes Club director of golf Dennis Nicholl, approximately 20 to 25 larger trees were felled by a storm that hit the property Friday night, with an additional heavy amount of debris throughout the layout from fallen limbs and branches.
The Dunes Club was closed Saturday and Sunday and reopened Monday. Nicholl likened the damage at the course to a low-level hurricane.
“It’s what we do in the golf business, get it back open as soon as we can,” Nicholl said. “We had backup buzzers and hammers going with the build out and takedown of the Myrtle Beach Classic, now we’ll switch it over to wood chippers and blowers this next couple weeks.”
In addition to getting areas prepared for play, a primary reason for keeping the course closed Sunday was to eliminate dangerous situations with broken or damaged tree limbs, including some that were hanging. They were either removed or roped off so carts couldn’t drive beneath them.
“More so out of safety than anything, we’ve just got to make sure nobody’s going to get hurt or there aren’t issues with any trees coming down still,” Nicholl said. “We want to make sure the course is as safe as we can make it before we open it back up.”
Despite all the damage and loss of trees, Nicholl said the integrity and playability of the course hasn’t really been impacted since the trees were on the periphery of holes. “Nothing really in the playable areas, nothing that affects our routing,” Nicholl said.
Dunes Club officials believe the storm was likely a microburst or something similar rather than a tornado.
“Typically if you see a tornado you can kind of follow it. Usually there’s a distinct line,” said Dunes Club director of agronomy and facilities Steve Hamilton. “[This] is kind of hodgepodgy. We’ve got a little bit over here and we’ve got some stuff over here, and in between it there’s nothing. I just think it was those straight-line winds.”
According to the National Weather Service, a microburst is a localized column of sinking air (downdraft) within a thunderstorm and is usually up to 2.5 miles in diameter.
Microbursts can cause extensive damage and can be life-threatening at the surface. They spread as they hit the ground, but where the microburst first hits the ground experiences the highest winds and greatest damage. Wind speeds as high as 150 mph are possible in extreme microburst cases.
About this time last year, a microburst hit several golf courses in Pawleys Island, forcing the closure of River Club, Litchfield Country Club, Tradition Club, Willbrook Plantation and the private Reserve Golf Club while cleanup was performed.
Hamilton said the storm lasted 9 minutes, based on Dunes Club residents’ ring camera footage.
“It was crazy how fast that whipped through here and just destroyed everything,” Nicholl said.
The clubhouse and newly built ocean club were both spared any damage, other than outside furniture being displaced.
The storm came through the property heading generally east toward the ocean, based on the direction the trees fell, and impacted several holes including 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 16, and 18.
The damage was done to a number of oak and pine trees. Snapped trees fell onto the 18th tee box, in front of the 16th tee box, over a bunker to the right of the fourth green, and between the second and 15th greens to open up the view between the two holes. A few felled trees blocked cart paths, as well.
A number of neighborhood residents also had trees fall on their property.
The Dunes Club had to cancel the Men’s Dunes Derby with 80-plus players on Saturday and had 170 players on the tee sheet Sunday that were canceled.
“We closed all our practice facilities and everything so the whole entire staff, my whole golf staff, and everybody could come out here and help,” Nicholl said. “. . . Unfortunately, or fortunately, however you want to look at it, we have a protocol for hurricane cleanup. When something like this happens we just text our staff and we switch from Peter Millar shirts and khaki pants to t-shirts, blue jeans, work boots and gloves. You grab your glasses and earplugs and come out here. We break up into teams and everybody knows what they have to do.”
Thinking of his golf staff and the maintenance staff, Nicholl lamented the fact that the storm came after a busy spring season; following the preparation for, playing of, and breakdown after the Myrtle Beach Classic; and just a week before the maintenance staff performs labor-intensive aeration throughout the course.
“We had pre-tournament planning for the Myrtle Beach Classic, the tournament, the number of hours everybody has to work during the tournament, then we have a couple member events but we were finally going to catch this little bit of a window to catch our breath before aerification starts next week,” Nicholl said. “Nobody expected this.”
A tree company was hired to handle the largest trees, and Dunes Club employees largely handled the debris and smaller limbs, and helped feed a lot of them into wood chippers.
“It’s just like a tropical storm or a little hurricane,” Hamilton said. “It’s Mother Nature’s way of kind of thinning the herd, because a lot of these trees are already damaged, they’re hollow in the middle.”
If there was going to be tree loss, Hamilton has some nemesis trees in particular he would have chosen.
“I was hoping for a couple trees to drop,” Hamilton joked. “I’m thinking ‘this one has got to be on the ground,’ and there’s not a limb off of it.”
